IT and Patience

Communicate Solutions' Data Center

Here at Communicate Solutions, we have a distributed "data center".  I use quotes because it's not like a traditional data center where all our servers are housed in a single climate controlled, key-card secured room in South Carolina. Our machines are actually VPS's, located in different parts of the country and hosted by different vendors.  This works well since we don't have to invest in any specific hardware, get to pick and choose the vendor for the application, and get the traditional advantages of the data center (backup power, redundant data, climate control, etc).  The only hard part is backing up the data from all these machines.  We used to do backups via FTP and boy was that a nightmare.  Custom scripts, password management, security issues, and flaky network connections meant headaches and less than ideal results.  What's a geek to do?

Cue Bacula

Bacula is the Open Source, Enterprise ready, Network Backup Tool for Linux, Unix, Mac and Windows.  It is what we implemented and it has been rock solid.   It's got centralized administration, backup, recovery, data verification, volume management, and messaging to name a few features.  The real advantage is the centralized administration of backing up diverse clients.  From one command prompt, I can backup my Windows and Linux machines.  The data gets encrypted over the wire and stored with compression, which keeps backup small.  Volume management means that I can define a retention policy and old backups are cycled out as new backups are taken.

The Catch

If there's any catch with Bacula, it's that the there needs to be a Linux box where the central console runs.  If you don't run Linux anywhere, sorry, you're pretty much S.O.L.  Other than that, there's a bit of a learning curve with the volume management stuff if you're not familiar with the concepts.  The documentation is exquisite though.

So if you're wondering how you're going to backup your data without losing your mind or spending an arm and a leg, definitely take a look at Bacula.  Because of it I can now sleep peacefully :)

P.S.

As Joel says, make sure you're backups are being tested with restores.  Otherwise its all for not!