Hello, 2 year Bacula user but first-time poster.  I’m currently dumping about 1.6TB to LTO2 tapes every week and I’m looking to migrate to a new storage medium.

 

The obvious answer, I think, is a direct-attached disk array (which I would be able to put in a remote gigabit-attached datacenter before too long).  However, I’m wondering if anyone is currently doing large (or what seem to me to be large) backups to the cloud in some way?  Assuming I have a gigabit connection to the Internet from my datacenter, I’m wondering how feasible it would be to either use something like Amazon S3 with s3fs (I’m guessing way too much overhead to be efficient), or a bacula-SD implementation on an EC2 node, using Elastic Block Store (EBS) as “local” disk, and VPN (Amazon VPC) between my datacenter and the SD.

 

Substitute your favorite cloud provider for Amazon above; I don’t use any right now so not tied to any particular provider.  It just seems like Amazon has all the necessary pieces today.

 

To do this, and keep customers comfortable with the idea of data in the cloud, we would need to encrypt, so I’m also wondering if it would be possible for the SD to encrypt the backup volume, rather than the FD encrypt the data before sending it to SD (which is what we do now)?  Easier to manage if we just handled encryption in one place for all clients.

 

I would love to hear what other people are either doing with Bacula and the cloud, or why you have decided not to.

 

Thanks

 

Peter Zenge

Pzenge .at. ilinc .dot. com