CrudVision - Lisa Seelye

Following up to Backing up to Amazon S3 using Amanda (June 28, 2008):

I’ve been having issues with both Amanda+S3 as well as JungleDisk. I’ll outline these here.

JungleDisk Problems

• JungleDisk sometimes destroys all of my data on S3 in the bucket JungleDisk uses and then on the next backup re-uploads all of the data! This is clearly a problem. Luckily I do not have more than a gigabyte of data thats backed up with JungleDisk. If I did this bug (or feature?) would be very expensive.
• JungleDisk doesn’t smartly handle moves. I’d like to be able to move things around on my local filesystem and have JungleDisk notice this and move them. Moving them over WebDAV isn’t feasible.
• JungleDisk scans individual files and doesn’t combine a whole bunch of them into one tarball. This gets very expensive! I wish they’d tar it all up first like Amanda.

Amanda+S3 Problems

• Sometimes the Amanda S3 device module has problems talking to S3. The only fix I’ve found so far is to destroy the bucket, remove it from the tapelist, readd the bucket, reidentify the bucket to Amanda and run amflush. This is clearly not good as it’s just as bad as Jungledisk destroying everything. I haven’t figured out why this happens yet.

Both products are still good and I’ll continue to use them. I’m considering using Amanda on my laptop, however, but this could cause problems in cases where it isn’t connected to the network at backup time.

Recently a friend of mine (Sarah) purchased a dedicated server at a hosting company and moved her data to it. Obviously she was in need of a backup solution. She chose Amanda 2.6.0 and to use S3 as her “tape” choice.

Seeing how well it worked for her I asked her to show me how it worked and now my server is also using Amanda to backup to S3. Recovery works with amrecover.

I have quite a bit of data to back up (4.5GB in /home, for example) and with a home DSL connection it takes a long time. However with a bigger pipe using S3 and Amanda would be extremely viable.

I’m very happy with the solution and will likely use it across all of my servers from now on.

For my laptop I’m still using JungleDisk, which seems to work fine. 2.0 is a very good improvement.