Friday, April 17, 2009

Backups done right?

I'm fed up with NetBackup. It vaguely works most of the time, but not all (which makes it difficult to justify it as a backup solution). And it's sucking up a lot of time - management and configuration takes a lot of work.

My experience with Legato has been great. It's incredibly easy to manage, just works, and sits there in the background without needing me to constantly mother it. It's not perfect - the latest java-based GUI is pretty horrid, and my experience of it in non-unix (ie. Windows) environments is that it's a duck out of water.

So, I'm looking around. I'll probably give Amanda a whirl. So if anyone has experience of both Amanda (or Zmanda) *and* one or both the above options, then feel free to comment - I'm particularly interested in comparisons.

9 comments:

Andy Steingruebl said...

Frankly, I never had as much luck with llegato as netbackup. Frankly, we used to call one of the legato processes the "catalog corruption daemon" as it seemed like based on how many times it did corrupt the catalog, that perhaps it was actually designed to do so.....

benr said...

I agree with the first comment, my experience has been better with NetBackup than Legato... but I admit I haven't used either in 3 years.

I found the Open Source options Amanda and Bacula to be overly complex and I never had the patience to get confortable with them.

BakBone is an excellent choice technically, but the GUI is horrible. If they put the NetBackup GUI on BakBone it'd be a winner.

Zmanda is excellent. Gives you all the goodness of Amanda without all the admin pain.

One option I'm starting to like due to its NDMP capabailities (which Zmanda didn't have last I checked) was Arkia (sp?).

Anonymous said...

That's Arkeia: http://www.arkeia.com/

Unknown said...

NetBackup is a disaser. We kicked it to the curb almost 3 years ago and switched to BakBone NetVault. Head and shoulders above NetBackup

Matt said...

I supported both NetBackup and NetWorker for many years each. My enterprise solution of choice is TSM (Tivoli Storage Manager). It can be a chore to configure and manage, but it is an industrial strength solution.

serverhorror said...

I don't know NetBackup or the other one, I've worked with amanda thou and now with bacula.

Bacula being the only "enterprise backup solution" that is completely open sourced and is mainly living from support.

With the just release V3 they do have some features that I've really been missing now (Synthetic Backups being the major one for me).

Give bacula a try. If you have money to spend and/or compliance to fullfill get a support contract.

Cr0ft said...

Put Bacula on the top of your shortlist. It's outstanding and it being FOSS is just the icing on the cake. Bacula.org

Kiran Chikkala said...

Nice Aryicle

IT-Gal said...

Following up on benr's comment. Zmanda has NDMP support now:

http://www.zmanda.com/ndmp.html