An alternative to the Veeam Suite

05 October 2021, 11:01:52

scenario:
I am working for a middle-sized enterprise which is producing light fixtures(so no IT related stuff

) as an admin/developer/guy for everything else remotely related to electronically stored 0s and 1s. So fullest-stack-maintainer at lowest level I'd describe it, or where I come from we'd say Turnschuhadmin plus plus

We use Veeam to backup our 2 ESXi hosts and I have to say: I really dislike this piece of software! It is not only that it costs money to do such a basic task but the usability is (for me) horrible too. I can't update to a current version, as I have to update from one explicit subversion to another first to finally get to current in the end. It is a pain to get any update packages at all and every package is then >1.5G. The clickyclicky interface is(at least for me) not really 'readable'. etc. etc.

question:
What would you guys suggest to have a look at as a(foss?) alternative for this basic task of backups for such an environment? Maybe you have some experience with an alternative already?

I've had a look at urbackup, but it looks to me as I have to have a client on every machine I want to backup? That sounds not really nice.
I've also had a look at xsi backup. But it seems as there is no 'IP backup' available for the free version? So I can't use a nfs as storage for my backups or what does that mean?

Every input on that would be highly appreciated

Re: An alternative to the Veeam Suite

Reply #1 – 05 October 2021, 22:40:42

Code: [Select]

$ sudo mount /dev/sdb* /mnt
$ ls /mnt
backup-rsync
$ sudo rsync -aHAXS --delete-before /* /mnt/backup-rsync --exclude={/dev,/mnt,/media,/proc,/run,/sys,/srv,/tmp,/var/run,/home/$user/my-homedir-mntdir}

This is how I backup my laptop, using rsync. Ideally you want 2 (at least) backup locations and backup to each on alternate occasions. Possible problems: if you don't exclude the backup location dir it recursively copies itself and fills it up. Once I modified the exclude bit but forgot to add the closing } bracket back on which meant that part was completely ignored. So it filled up the backup drive partition. When I got this error message I killed the process and went to delete everything in the partition but because of some weird effect probably due to dev and so on being copied, it went completely mad and started deleting my OS on /, I noticed when the desktop started disappearing and hit ctrl c. Somehow I managed to recover most things from the remains... so be careful not to get a typo like that.

I think I will try btrfs snapshots soon, a lot of people seem to like those for backups but not tried them myself yet.