Erik Anderson <erikerik at gmail.com> wrote:
>>    Bacula VM with NFS mounted drives.
> 
> Negative, captain. :)
> 
> Bacula has gone rogue[1]. Check into Bareos, which is a 100% F/OSS
> fork of Bacula.

Interesting. I implemented a pair of Bacula 8U multi-terrabyte servers
when working at Zayo Managed Services (was Onvoy) in 2006 to replace a
Legato server and tape silo. Worked great! As a traditional style
network backup solution, Bacula worked wonderfully.

It still suffered from typical storage issues of traditional backup
solutions that rely upon full, incremental, and differential backups. It
also required you to know how to maintain a MySQL server or PostgreSQL
server to store metadata about your backups. I haven't kept up to date
with it, and if it has indeed gone rogue, probably not the best option.

I've also tried BackupPC and liked it. Worked well on my Linux machines,
but I never really managed to spend time to get it working on my wife's
Mac.

I currently am a paying customer of CrashPlan and like the service. It's
a local company of awesome dudes just trying to write great
software. Yes, it's commercial, but not everything in life has to be
Free as in Libre. I'm paying them to keep an up to date copy of all of
my computers on their network; I figure I'm getting my money's worth.

To augment CrashPlan and to address a different issue, synchronizing
files, I've been using git-annex[1], written by Joey Hess in Haskel. It
uses git to store and synchronize metadata and a plugin (annex) to copy
the files around (doing cool things like ensuring multiple copies exist,
track off-line volumes, chose media types and or file types for
different annexes, etc). It keeps my Keepassx password files, MP3, and
photos synchronized between my phone, laptop, and kid's computer. I plan
on using it to synchronize to my wife's computer for media sharing,
etc. It takes a bit to wrap your head around it, but once you understand
how the files and metadata works, you're golden.

I've also been eyeballing bup[2]. Another git-based backup utility that
operates similar to other backup solutions in that you don't need to
great git repositories in the directories you want to track. Seems
useful! Additionally, there are ways of tying bup and git-annex together
- for example using bup as a backup repository for git-annex. :) Fun
stuff.


[1] http://git-annex.branchable.com/
[2] https://github.com/bup/bup

-- 
Chad