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Hi, hoping I can ask for some fairly generic and possibly specific feedback here please.
We currently us a very well regarded commercial product to backup our environment. Good product but licensing is prohibitive.
Our environment is pretty simple I think.
We have some VMware boxes running 5.5 with around 70 assorted VMs.
We backup most VMs in their entirety using the current backup solution.
We backup the OS VMDK of some VMs and skip the other VMDKs for those specific VMs.
We backup Exchange which is approx 1.5TB.
We backup a Windows File Server (VM) which is approx 8-10TB and approx 8-10 million files
We backup a Linux physical file server which is approx 8TB and a couple million files
We have a bunch of other file level agents backing up maybe 2-3TB total
Right now we go D2D2T and use global dedupe. The dedupe is nice but I don't think essential as if we took a long look at how we do things the Linux server would probably go directly to tape without dedupe.
I'm trialling Bacula now and we have the backups going to a spare NAS, but I don't have a spare tape library to be able to test out how the copy to tape would work.
My concerns and questions are mostly around peoples experiences of getting good performance and throughput from file servers, Windows in particular, where they may be a lot of fairly small files as I believe the Bacula agent can't "multi-stream" from different volumes on the same client at the same time?
Is there a consensus on options that offer the best combination of compression, data integrity, and ensuring that accuracy of backups is maintained?
I'm also struggling a little after only a few days testing Bacula to visualise how retention works i.e. if I back something up and want it on disk for 7 days but weekly backups on tape for 4 weeks, and monthly backups for a year, what happens when someone wants a file restoring from 3 months back i.e. can I simply browse the file tree, do I need to "index" the tapes that contain the backups, what happens if the backup is 8TB and spans multiple tapes and so on.
I'd love any feedback as from a scan of the mailing list archives and digging around online it's pretty clear we'd be a small site in terms of client count and possibly file count and data count.
I'm in a dilemma because the guys we're dealing with at Bacula are great, the licensing is great, and at a basic level we know it will do the job, but we're a little cautious about not ending up spending *way* more time looking after backups than we do now, and of course like most admins I'm juggling a few balls so cannot spend 100% of 50% of my time on the trial which means I have to focus on key things in the time I have.
Thanks!
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