Bacula vs. BackupPC

Question

I have been googling about the differences between them.

• Bacula has lots of roles
• BackupPC is easier to configure
• Bacula works with agent, not rsync (great for Windows backups)

It seems that Bacula is most often compared to Amanda though, while BackupPC seems a perfectly lovely and popular backup distribution to.

I currently backup my servers with rsnapshot, but I am looking for a professional scalable solution that could also back-up 50 hosts without problems. Preferably a solution that can offer bare metal restores for my Linux servers. I am not looking to reinstall the exact same version of Plesk, the software, etc...

Update: I see this ranks high in Google, I found a good article: http://www.serverfocus.org/backuppc-vs-bacula-vs-amanda. I personally think that BackupPC is good for smaller environment, but Bacula, despite the high learning curve, is better for environments that requilre scaling.

Solution 1

I'm using Bacula to backup 2 servers for 2 years now. My Bacula server is running in a ReadyNAS duo (which has only a 186 BogoMips sparc processor and 2x1To raid disk).

• Bacula scales quite well and is quite robust even if your backup storage becomes full,
• Bacula is not easy to configure at first but at the end it allows to control your backup strategies,
• It requires a database (sqlite or MySQL),
• Backup storage (tapes or files) have a proprietary compressed format,
• There is no user interface (some addon exist but they are not at the same level as BackupPC)

The biggest problems I have had were not in the Bacula configuration but in defining the good backup strategies to avoid backup storage explosion.

Check out the following article to know more: One year of data backup with Bacula on a ReadyNAS duo

Solution 2

Awhile ago, when I was attempting to replace my excellent collection of shell scripts to perform backups to a tape library with Bacula, I noticed one significant problem. The fact that it could not manage multiple tape drives for operations. This might have changed but it was a significant issue to me. What eventually happened was that the Netbackup package was implemented since my company got the license cheaper as part of a company takeover.

Comments

[voretaq7]

I'm not really sure what you're asking here -- perhaps you can edit your question to clarify? If you're looking for advice, I would say that I've been using Bacula successfully for many years, and if properly configured it is scalable and easy to manage. It also behaves in a manner that any backup/storage guy will be able to understand pretty easily. More info/stories/etc. @ linux.com/archive/feature/132562

[John Gardeniers]

How does Plesk factor into any of this?