Hi John, many thanks for your reply,
We generally don't use fancy features like staging, migrations etc. We
basically
save stuff to tapes. If I sqeeze my mind a little bit I can think of directed
recovers,
which is a feature I have the feeling that bacula does not provide. I may be
wrong though.
Also, our operators rely on the GUI networker application. Having them use the
text console
would certainly be undesirable (but to be honest it would not be impossible). I
understand
bacula lacks in that area too.
Kind Regards,
Athanasios
On Fri, Oct 06, 2006 at 03:11:54PM -0400, John Stoffel wrote:
> 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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