Many people who use open-source backup software become quite attached to their program, whether it's BackupPC, Amanda or Bacula. System administrators responsible for protecting data at small- and medium-sized companies or at the departmental level typically gravitate to these free programs because they're comfortable writing custom scripts; working with Unix and Linux; and using open-source backup tools such as rsync, which synchronizes files and directories between different locations, and tar, an archiving program.

Tony Schreiner, a Unix system administrator for biology and physics at Chestnut Hill, MA-based Boston College, has used Symantec's Veritas NetBackup and EMC's NetWorker, but moved to BackupPC because he wanted a free product. But, says Schreiner, "some very large files, greater than 50GB, never complete [their backup.]" He hasn't found a workaround yet except to exclude those files.

"I don't have a good scheme for backing up SQL databases, some of which are very large," he adds. "I could script a mysqldump as a pre-backup, but the dump takes several hours."

BackupPC is a disk-based backup and recovery system that was designed to work with desktops, servers and laptops. According to a recent report on open-source backup programs by Eric Burgener, a senior analyst and consultant at Hopkinton, MA-based Taneja Group, BackupPC is "weak in the areas of media management and securi...

Bacula, an open-source backup program with the slogan "It comes by night and sucks the vital essence from your computers," supports heterogeneous clients and can encrypt data in transit. Its backup catalog resides on a MySQL database, and it supports snapshots via Windows VSS. Data backed up by Bacula must be recovered by Bacula.

Of the three open-source backup programs discussed here, Burgener writes that Bacula is the "least mature" and "user postings online indicate that it can be quite complex to set up."

Users of Amanda can back up Linux, Unix, Mac and Windows clients to tape, disk and storage grids, such as Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3). Last year, Amanda distributor Zmanda Inc. began offering Amanda Enterprise, a beefed-up commercial version of Amanda with added features such as a Web-based GUI management console; one-click restore; and reporting and application agents (priced additionally) for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint, and Oracle (just released) that allows hot backups of Oracle databases on Windows, Solaris and popular Linux distributions.

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