[GTALUG] Backups with Bacula

[Christopher Browne]

On Thu, 11 Oct 2018 at 13:01, Tony Fernandez via talk <talk at gtalug.org> wrote:
>
> Hi All,
>
> I just recently joined your group and was hoping for some insight or advise on building a backup solution.
>
> My question is related to Bacula on FreeNAS. I hope it's ok that I ask if not I understand.
>
> ==Background==
> We run a mixed environment (Windows and Linux). I've been slowly moving services that we run over to Linux wherever possible however I've run into an issue with our existing backup server. It is a Microsoft product. I'm not looking for help on it, instead I am looking for advise on using bacula.
>
> I've configured Bacula and have it working successfully and I like how I can deploy agents onto my servers to handle backups. I love the distributed achitecture.
>
> So my question: I'd like to use FreeNAS as our StorageDaemon (sd) going forward. I'd also like to do remote offsite backups by either rsyncing files over to a remote server or by getting FreeNAS to backup to an external HDD that I rotate weekly.
>
> ==Questions==
> Does anyone see any issues with this?
> What do you think about the HDD rotation?


Bacula has always seemed to be one of the good options out there, and
running it on FreeNAS is certainly well supported.

There's nothing obviously wrong with your approach to rsync to a
remote place or copy to external HDD for rotation.

Madison Kelly did a talk on something akin back in 2004; Madison was
the first person I heard that particularly "championed" using
USB-connected HDDs as a backup medium at the time that tape drives
were only just starting to get supplanted as a backup medium.

Since then, that direction has become somewhere in between "viable"
and "preferable."  And it now looks like tape drives are pretty rarely
used anymore, as rarity has made it difficult for vendors to boost
capacity as quickly as is the case for disk drives.  *Everyone* wants
bigger HDDs.  (Well, we're starting to glimpse a place where solid
state drives are getting sufficiently large and cheap that a lot of
computer systems now prefer SSD, and we may see HDDs go somewhat down
the road that tape drives have...)

Rotating the HDDs so that they do get spun up fairly regularly is a good idea.
-- 
When confronted by a difficult problem, solve it by reducing it to the
question, "How would the Lone Ranger handle this?"