[Hidden-tech] New Massachusetts Encryption Law

[RA Cohen]

More on Bacula vs Amanda:

RE: Amanda vs Bacula vs ... ? <http://www.osnews.com/thread?307733>
by segedunum <http://www.osnews.com/user/segedunum> on Wed 2nd Apr 2008 
15:08 in reply to "Amanda vs Bacula vs ... ? 
<http://www.osnews.com/thread?307702>"
segedunum <http://www.osnews.com/user/segedunum/comments/> Member since:
2005-07-06

I had to look into backup solutions some time ago, and Amanda and Bacula 
were the two I got down to. While Amanda has been around for some time, 
is very mature and has improved greatly recently, if it's a network 
backup system with all the 'enterprisey' features you think you need 
then Bacula is pretty incredible. You can take all manner of expensive 
backup software such as Netbackup, drop it in the bin and replace it 
with Bacula. It even has a nice GUI now. In later versions (> 1.38) it 
now lets you mount a partition before backup and unmount it afterwards 
for safety.

Bacula has clients for Windows, Linux, Unix, Mac OS and anything it will 
compile on, the Windows client uses Volume Shadow Copy and it's possible 
to backup and restore ACLs on any platform and have any tape, disk or 
backup medium arrangement you can think of. We use it in conjunction 
with LVM snapshots to make downtime as long as it takes to create a 
read-only snapshot.

I have three of these Linkstation devices at different locations:

http://buffalo.nas-central.org/index.php/FreeLink_for_the_Linkstati... 
<http://buffalo.nas-central.org/index.php/FreeLink_for_the_Linkstation_Pro>

They are all modified to run a full Debian Freelink distribution as 
described in that article, all with Bacula installed and all backing up 
to internal and external hard drives, as well as off-site. Many people 
still use tape quite happily (we don't for cost and manpower reasons 
mainly), but it is a very good idea to have some form of disk based 
backup as well. It's not as if tapes are indestructible.

Enterprise backup without the cost. Priceless.



> Mark Firehammer wrote:
>> I use Retrospect. They have a number of products that encrypt 
>> backups. Mac
>> or PC
>>
>> "Highest level, government standard security for backup media
>> Retrospect can use 128- or 256-bit AES encryption, in addition to
>> SimpleCrypt and DES encryption to ensure the security of your data."
>>  
>> http://www.retrospect.com/products/software/retroforwin/   
>
>
> Roger Williams wrote:
>> All recent versions of AMANDA support encryption.  This might be a good
>> solution if you already have your tape drives.
>>
>> But if you were thinking about buying new tape drives, it would be a 
>> good idea
>> to compare the prices of drives with hardware encryption.
>>   
>
>
> Roger Williams wrote:
>> One of my colleagues pointed out that Bacula can also do this.  It 
>> might be a
>> bit more versatile than Amanda.
>>   
>
>
> RA Cohen wrote:
>>
>> Bacula certainly supports data encryption -->>  
>> http://www.bacula.org/en/dev-manual/Data_Encryption.html
>>
>> All of my clients are running bacula and I am certainly available to 
>> assist others with this fine "Enterprise-Grade" program.
>
>
> Well, we could get into religious wars here. ;-)
>
> Amanda and Bacula are both open source projects and typically require 
> a little more effort in the initial setup than some commercial 
> products. But they are free and have free community support.
>
> Both products also have commercial support available from various 
> consultants and companies. It seems that Bacula has a little stronger 
> local support from consultants in Europe, although Amanda clearly has 
> stronger commercial support worldwide. Zmanda has been providing 
> commercial support for a few years as well as funding programmers to 
> work on the project; and, through their enterprise partnership with 
> Sun, has enlisted Sun contract support for enterprises worldwide. So, 
> in the last few years, Amanda development has moved faster and more 
> solidly. They are one of the few open source projects that has been 
> Security Certified by the Department of Homeland Security. They have 
> also recently developed an interface for backing up to Amazon S3. So, 
> you can put your encrypted data out on the cloud, if you choose.
>
> Recently, linuxquestions.org held their annual members choice awards, 
> and Amanda finished well ahead of Bacula in the voting.
>
> Several years back, if I were in a Mac or Windows environment (without 
> Linux or Unix), I would have *highly* recommended Retrospect. I don't 
> think there has ever been a better product or better customer support 
> than what Dantz Development had in Retrospect in the 1990's on the 
> Mac. It isn't exactly dying on the vine; but, in the years since it 
> was bought out by EMC, it hasn't received the attention that I think 
> it should. I still have situations where I use it, and I haven't found 
> what I would regard as a really good alternative in the Small to 
> Medium Business market for Mac and Windows. There certainly are 
> products out there, but user complaints are typically loud and/or the 
> prices are very high.
>
> When I chose between Amanda and Bacula several years ago, I chose 
> Amanda for a couple of reasons. I thought the programming support was 
> stronger, the long term history was stronger, I liked the structure 
> and approach, and it didn't have the complexity for running and for 
> disaster recovery in terms of all the things it required. For Bacula, 
> you have to be running multiple daemons and an SQL database. 
> Sometimes, the SQL database can be the performance bottleneck. In 
> disaster recovery situations, you have more to get up and running 
> before you can really start recovering, and recovering an SQL database 
> can be a project in itself. With Amanda, I can read the tapes with 
> native utilities and basically just need a Linux or Unix system with a 
> tape drive. I've also had unbelievably good rock solid stability from 
> Amanda.  When I had a hardware failure on my tape drive a couple of 
> years ago, I didn't have time to be worrying about what Amanda was 
> doing. I had to focus on getting the drive repaired and dealing with 
> the vendor. That ended up taking a couple of days. Amanda's 
> intelligent planner automatically dropped back and did incremental 
> backups only to disk, trying to conserve holding disk space until the 
> tape drive became available again. When the tape drive was repaired, 
> late one evening, and I went home dog tired, Amanda noticed it 
> running, cycled through the tapes, and automatically flushed the 
> incrementals out to tape and began catching up on full backups. The 
> next morning, all I had to do was read the email report from Amanda to 
> see that things were back to normal. I never had to touch Amanda 
> through the whole episode. It just did what it was supposed to do, and 
> my systems continued to get backed up every night.
>
> Anyway, for either Amanda or Bacula, you need a slightly more tech 
> savvy sysadmin to get things set up and running. Typically, the server 
> will be Linux or Unix. Both can back up Macs and PCs.
>
>

-- 
Roy A Cohen
Network Advantage LLC
413.223.9007
www.net-vantage.com

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