[olug] remote monitoring and remote backup server software

[Dave Hull]

Quoting Eric Lusk <wyrmzr72 at yahoo.com>:

Can't help you with Nagios. Never used it.

> I'm thinking Bacula for the remote backup, but was
> curious whether anyone has had success with anything
> else for WAN-type backups?

I ran Amanda at my previous place of employment. I was backing up a 
couple dozen
boxes with over half a terrabyte of data and it worked well for our 
environment.
The initial setup was time consuming and not as straightforward as I 
would have
liked, but few things ever are.

Amanda's scheduling is interesting. You can't tell it to do a full 
backup on the
weekends and incrementals on weekdays, etc. like with most backup software.
Instead you tell it to do a full backup n number of times per dump cycle.
Amanda then calculates how much data there is to be backed up and then 
balances
the load over the dump cycle. The nice thing about this is that the 
backups tend
to take the same amount of tape and the same amount of time every day.

Contrast this with where I work now... our full backups start on a 
Friday night
and continue through the weekend until Monday morning sometime.

-- 
Dave Hull
http://insipid.com