Data handling is a complicated task as it requires full time attention and application without any errors and miss handling. Yet, a good back up tool is the most essential element in data center environments in order to recover from uncontrollable problems such as human errors, disk failure, file system corruption or data center destruction. Data loss can be catastrophic in terms of cost and efforts, causing a huge amount of loss of important information, family files, business reports, and other important files that are not possible to be replaced off. Hence, without any proper recovery solution, it might take a few days or weeks to repair the damage and sometimes even the damage is not repairable. Alternatively, back up solutions to data environment are way too expensive and can cause hell lot of time and money ranging from 1,00,000$ for medium or large companies to a thousand dollars for small companies.
But fortunately, open source software are always available to our rescue and same is the case with back up tools for data handling. Unlike any other back up tool, open source is the most widely used among all due to their flexibility and low cost feature. They are available for various organizations and individuals to protect their valuable data at ease.
Below, I am providing you with top open source data back up tools that provide support for UNIX, Linux, BSD, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS-X.
1. AMANDA– Advanced Maryland Disc Archive is one of the oldest backup software packages. It tracks all the back ups and allows to restore any file from a previous version of that file that was backed up by Amanda. It is wrapped around native backup tools like tar (UNIX/Linux) and zip (Windows). Amanda enabled formats are easily available on any open-systems platform. It is a sophisticated platform that comprises of number of enterprise level like features such as automatically determining when to run your full backups, instead of having you face the problem of scheduling them. It is the only open source package to have database agents for SQL Server, Exchange, Oracle and SharePoint. Amanda is efficient and effective in keeping a back up of large number of servers and workstations running multiple versions of Linux and UNIX. Another cloud based service that provides with similar technology is Zmanda, which is owned by Carbonite.
CONS– It is a patchy documentation and is best suited for Linux and UNIX in comparison to Windows.
2. BACULA– It was originally written by Kern Sibbald, who wrote a custom backup format designed to overcome the limitations of native tools. Although Bacula is only a file back up product and does not provide any database agents, yet it has advanced storage media management features that allow to use automated tape libraries and perform disk-to-disk backups thus, making it easy to find and recover the lost damaged files. It offers two versions namely enterprise and community edition. The community edition version provides with basic features required to start along with managing backup, recovery and verification of computer data. The enterprise version provides various back ups such as Cloud Backup, Bacula Backup for VMs It can be configured via CLI, GUI, or web interface.
CONS– Its search capability is very on and off and hence a lot of tricks need to be earned for fetching the search results the way you want.
3. BACKUP PC– It is a disk-only backup tool that forever performs incremental backups, and stores those backups in their native format. It is a file only back up tool and its accumulative nature might be cramped by large database files. It can archive large number of files to local or networked disk storage and compress them thus reducing storage hardware capacity and costs. It is a superior enterprise-grade system for backing up Linux, Windows and Mac OS X PCs. The most important feature of Backup PC is that it performs file-level- d-duplication, which implies if you have a file duplicated anywhere in your data environment, it will find that duplicate and replace it with a link to the original file.
CONS– Slow performance for large data backups and cannot be trusted upon for remote use in case of huge data.
Above were some of the best open source backup tools that IT professionals personally recommend, whereas we have many other common backup tools such as Bareos, Clonezilla, Fog, Rsync, and BURP; which can be used. Out of huge varieties of Open source backup tools, choosing a data backup is a tedious task but it depends on the purpose of the storing the backup. For example if your database agents are big drivers then go for Amanda, and similarly if you require a least proprietary backup then go for BackupPC. This implies that the out of free open source backup tools, which one we should opt depends on what is your requirement according to the value and size of the data.
Yet there need to be certain points to be considered before blindly downloading an open source data backup tool. The first and the foremost is whether your company is ready to install and invest in an open source data back up as though they are free but they require investment in terms of time, knowledge and maintenance cost. All in all, we need to be cautious while selecting the open source data backup, keeping in mind its pros and cons.
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