Athanasios> I 've been a (relatively) happy user of networker for 6
Athanasios> years. Recently I was tasked to evaluate the possibility
Athanasios> of replacing our networker software with the Bacula
Athanasios> distribution. The reasons which lead to this outcome are:
Athanasios> 1)We are havily using FreeBSD, which is almost entirely
Athanasios> unsupported by networker.
Bacula is heavily supported by Kern, the main author. I run it at
home. You're in for some shocks though, because while is has most of
the features of Networker in terms of spanning backups across multiple
tapes, multiplexing, staging to disk then to tape, etc it has some
serious downsides in my view.
1. bconsole, the cli command tool sucks. The command set isn't well
thought out, etc. You can muddle through it, but it's painful at
times.
2. While the docs are excellent for an open source product, it's
actually fairly painful to figure out some stuff. This can
certainly be addressed, and probably should be at some point.
3. Adding a client, or modifying file lists, etc is more involved than
it really needs to be.
4. Restores are a pain, there's no nice equivilent of 'recover'. It's
much more painful than that. Again, this could be addressed in newer
versions.
5. No equivilent to nsrwatch.
Athanasios> 2)The local EMC representative charges way too much for
Athanasios> only a limited set of enabled features.
Don't they all! The price of bacula is certainly right.
Athanasios> 4)We are not using tape libraries and robots, so we not
Athanasios> too dependent on networker being able to talk to these
Athanasios> kinds of devices.
The newest version of Bacula is certainly working better and better
with robots, esp those with multiple drives. It's also working much
better when using DVD media as well.
Athanasios> Has anyone had any experience with Bacula? Does it stand a
Athanasios> chance against networker? Has anyone made a successful
Athanasios> transistion to Bacula?
Not at work, but at home it's been working pretty well I'd say.
I've been using Networker now since 1994 (4.2.6) and I still like it,
esp the CLI tools such as nsrwatch, etc.
If you can, setup a new server to run Bacula and run it in parallel
before you do a full cutover.
Also, what features are most important to you? You didn't really
spell that out besides OS support.
John
John Stoffel - Senior Staff Systems Administrator - System LSI Group
Toshiba America Electronic Components, Inc. - http://www.toshiba.com/taec
john.stoffel AT taec.toshiba DOT com - 508-486-1087
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