[GTALUG] Backups with Bacula

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Thu, Oct 18, 2018 at 04:21:41PM -0400, Christopher Browne via talk wrote:
> 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.

My experience some years ago with 3 USB harddrives that were rotated
weekly was that the disks didn't last long.  3.5" HDs do not like
being moved a lot and frequently died.  Moving to tape was way way
more reliable but certainly had a higher cost in terms of getting a
tape drive and for recovery you might need another tape drive while a
USB drive works with anything.

If your backup is pretty small though, USB attached SSD seems like it
could be a very reliable solution.

-- 
Len Sorensen