Backups on DVD

[Paul Howarth]

dan wrote:
> Alexander Spanke (heh) also suggested using Amanda.  Amanda is an 
> amazing tool, but another program called Bacula beats it hands-down.
> 
> Both utilities have an option for incremental backups, which is what you 
> might also want to consider if using DVDs.  Take one initial huge 
> backup, and weekly, create a new incremental backup.  Doing this, you 
> won't have to store 20+ gigs each time.  It's up to you to decide if 
> this server grows more than 4.7G per each backup period.

I'm also a bacula fan. I do a "differential" dump every weekend (all 
changed files since last "full" dump) and incremental dumps every night 
(I'm backing up 3 machines). I have bacula write to 500MB files on a 
machine with a DVD writer. When I've got enough of these 500MB files to 
fill a DVD, I write a DVD. DVD media are very cheap indeed and I end up 
getting most files backed up on several different DVDs over a period of 
time. I'm very happy with this solution to my backup needs.

Moreover, bacula keeps a database of backed-up files and I can pretty 
easily recover a specific file from a specific date if I need to; bacula 
will tell me which volume the file is on and will recover if for me from 
that volume when I've loaded it.

Paul.