Athanasios> We generally don't use fancy features like staging,

Staging isn't a fancy feature really, it's a nice way to let dumps
trickle in and not shoe-shine the tape drive.  I just turned this on
at home and I can already hear the difference on my DLT7k drive.  It's
running alot better and not stop/rewind/start all the time.  My goal
is to give a bunch of disk space to staging, right now I only have 8gb
available, but that's due to my FireWire external enclosure being
crap.  

Athanasios> migrations etc. We basically save stuff to tapes. If I
Athanasios> sqeeze my mind a little bit I can think of directed
Athanasios> recovers, which is a feature I have the feeling that
Athanasios> bacula does not provide. I may be wrong though.  

Bacula let's you choose where to recover the data, just like
Networker.  The interface just isn't as nice as the 'recover' cli
tool.  It's useable, just not great.

Athanasios> Also, our operators rely on the GUI networker
Athanasios> application. Having them use the text console would
Athanasios> certainly be undesirable (but to be honest it would not be
Athanasios> impossible). I understand bacula lacks in that area too.

Bacula does have a GUI, though I tend not to use it since I don't care
for GUIs much.  I'm faster (generally) at the CLI level.  I will
admin that Networker's nwadmin is much easier to use to
add/change/delete tape drives and other resources like that, but for
moving tapes around, nsrjb, mminfo, etc are better.

I do see that Amanda now does span backups across multiple tapes,
which has been a feature long wanted.  But it still has the philosophy
of trying to backup only as much data as will fit onto a single tape
each night, and to rotate backups around to fit in that model.  So
making Amanda (older versions I admit, this might have changed in the
2.5.x realease) only do fulls on the weekends and incrementals other
times was much tougher.  

Bacula lets you do much better fine grain scheduling.  It also does
differential backups as well, but you'd really need to read the docs
to decide if it's what you want.

In general I can recommend Bacula, it's solid.  

John

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