[GRLUG] Backup Options

[Dan Pilcheck]

Good Afternoon GRLUG!

I get to revamp our backup system at work and I'm looking for some
thoughts on practices and procedures.
We have about a dozen servers, 1 Win2k3 App server, with the rest some
flavor of *nix.
I (and everyone else i'm sure) want automation and easy-to-restore
backups for each server.

I'd like to backup a wide variety of data, ranging from Asterisk,
samba, vpn, sql, emails and domain configs
Weekend fulls and weekday incrementals with a monthly copy archived is
what I'd like have on hand.
I'd love to have an image of each machine, but I think even doing that
monthly would consume a ton of space.
I'll probably just keep an image of the Win2k3 server, its only about
100gb. I have roughly 1TB to

I stumbled across Bacula (Bacula.org) and had a friend recommend
AMANDA (http://www.amanda.org/ http://www.zmanda.com/) to me as a
Backupserver solution.

Does anyone have experience with either system? Or is a tar script
still the preferred solution?
Is a central backup preferred over a externally mounted disk?

Thanks for the input,
-Dan

-- 
Who is to say that the next step in evolution is not a statistical
chance but rather a by-product of our own will?
That from here on out, nature stops deciding who survives and who
doesn't, but our own decisions?