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We currently run Bacula for our network but it seems really overly-complicated for what its doing.

Is there a good alternative to Bacula out there that anyone could recommend that runs on Linux and handles both Linux and Windows clients? Or is Bacula pretty much the best solution atm?

Jake Wilson
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    And what is that you're doing? – gravyface Nov 19 '10 at 04:48
  • Shopping Questions are Off-Topic on any of the [se] sites. See [Q&A is hard, lets go Shopping](http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2010/11/qa-is-hard-lets-go-shopping) and the [FAQ] for more details. – Chris S Oct 25 '12 at 12:53
  • If Bacula is overly-complicated, try Bareos, it is a Bacula drop and easy to setup and has a webui to to some admin task like restoring files straight to the client. – elsadek Apr 11 '16 at 05:30

5 Answers5

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Amanda/Zmanda may be an alternative to bacula, but it I'm guessing that you are looking for something other than an equivalent system.

The answer to your question requires... a more detailed question. ;-)

I'm going to guess that by saying overly-complicated, you are really looking for a less complicated solution. And, this would imply that your needs don't match your solution.

If you enumerate your needs, you can A) focus your own research starting somewhere like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_backup_software and B) expect more thorough answers to your question.

I've administered Legato and I've done some work with both Amanda and bacula. They are all essentially the same solution with differing implementation details. Do you need something more radically different? Maybe try a solution like Crashplan? This will require you to fill out your question even further to explore your comfort levels with proprietary formats and cloud services and their related security implications. In order to get something very different from traditional centralized network backup software, you are going to need to figure this out anyway.

In short, you need a list of requirements (when don't you?) and some way of evaluating risks and rewards. Multiply that by the power of Server Fault and you should have something you can take back to the team to look at.

Dave Stenglein
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    I find that the problem with Bacula is the configuration bureaucracy. Upon any change that I might want to make, I have to edit the director and the client component, and restart both. This is way too error-prone, and the written-in passwords (as opposed to a bluetooth like pairing that would store an actually secure key generated on the spot) are dumb. That added to the fact that I have to restart the director, the freaking director, upon any and every change (no idea about the effect of this on running jobs) made me decide Bacula seems over-engineered compared to its actual reliability. – Ekevoo Apr 11 '12 at 21:51
  • Same here, if you separate the Bacula SDs on separate machines like we did its even worse. Why should a tool require both configuration files and database entries of the exact same data is beyond me and I feel I micromanage changes to this tool. It has too many things that need to go right for it to work like certs get registered on director and client, client configs correct, director configs correct, that its not practical for anything larger than a home system. One option you might try is reloading the director though since that should reset config file changes. – user1207381 Nov 24 '15 at 20:01
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Bacula and Amanda are top choices for open source centralized data backup. Try installing bat(bacula administration tool) or bacula web gui for easier administration.

Jonar
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You don't need to restart Bacula for every change. Just run a reload from the bconsole and it will reread the configuration. Of course you can make your config very dynamic. Bacula can look in directories for config files and merge them all together. We have different config files for each job. You can create a tool the make these config files. So it is actually very flexible. Bacula follows the UNIX principles, maybe you need to get used to that?

HopelessN00b
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Martijn de Munnik
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  • In addition, running the daemon in question with test arguments "-t -c " will dump all config file errors without disturbing the running system. – kmarsh Jul 28 '16 at 23:38
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Have a look at Amanda/Zmanda. Open source with community and enterprise options. Works on a wide variety of OSs such as Linux, Solaris, OS X, Windows. It even has agents for popular databases like PostgreSQL and other products like SharePoint and Exchange.

Wesley
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I use BackupPC for 4 years now and it's fantastic how it is user friendly with interface and how many backup solutions there are. You can backup with rsync, rsyncd, smb... Well it works fine for me with Linux and Windows as you asked. In addition you can plan full backups and incrementals with strategy. I've looked on other open source solution but BackupPC looks better in a lot of points. I hope this will help you in your choice

Deimosfr
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