Actually, I understand that you have a view that you dont agree with me.
I work in the business of protecting enterprise data and have done for many years, so I do think it is accurate (hence why I mentioned it).
I see what clients are asking for, and the legacy "backup server" and "backup client" is not as popular as it was 20+ years ago.
When I look at alternative backup technologies, I *can* see that the "backup server" is less of a requirement today than it was, because
there now exists new storage technologies that change the architecture
and cost of having said architecture, but still deliver on the requirements.
True, enterprise scheduling, as is scalability is a requirement, and
there are strong technologies in that space as well, that organisations are using anyway outside of "backup and recovery".
I too support IT enterprises and have done so for the last ~25 years. I agree that things have changed, but they have also very much stayed the same. We don't use tapes anymore and "off site" is now "the cloud" and not Iron Mountain
(although they probably still exist too). You specifically mentioned the the model of a manager/files/storage has gone/is going away, while at the same time
explaining that your bash scripts and cron jobs are doing the exact same thing.
So I still feel that what you said is inaccurate - its not wrong, its just not entirely correct. You still need *something* to schedule your backups, something to fetch what you want to back up and a place to put them. That does not go away, and tools like Bacula and others fit very well into the modern version of this believe it or not.
I doubt your customers are saying they don't want an old model or they specifically want a new model of backups - they just want their backups to work
and have come to you so they don't have to think about it, and are probably not
being very specific about how that is done. If they are being that specific about their backup strategy... yikes, tough customers.
By using your own bash scripts and cron jobs to achieve the same goal, you are missing out on a lot of very valuable tools that come along with it - the reporting, messaging/alerting, and a number of other features that can be useful to even home users would have to be re-written and you're collection of scripts is just going to fill the same hole that software like bacula fills. I like getting emails when jobs fail and I like having a dashboard to show me status, storage capacity, etc - bash scripts aren't going to do all
of that extra stuff without a whole lot of time and work.
Even when I write terraform to do large deployments, I'm still setting schedules, rotations, vaults, etc for my backups - its the same things being configured that bacula does, just in the cloud, and still using them to recover
when things go bad (which honestly is extremely rare). Sometimes this is in the
form of snapshots even, which is really not traditional, but still circles back
to the same methodology.
Am I going to use Bacula to backup my dev team's kubernetes clusters? Nope, never, but I'm not using bash scripts and cron jobs either. Am I going to use it to backup on-prem production or Mystic or the games I run and the dozens of other things I do for fun, even docker containers? Yes.. absolutely - I'm not dealing with straight bash scripts and cron jobs for those tasks anymore. I've done it and I'd rather not reinvent the wheel again. Could I use my NAS with a built in backup feature? Probably, but its not really any different.
A lot of people around these echoes seem be running their own "cloud" at home, and they don't have the tools that Azure or AWS provides for backups. They might not have a NAS with a built in feature. I still hold the opinion that straight bash scripts vs a mature tool to do the job is going to be more of a headache for most people, especially if you're not the only one managing it. Even if you are using xen-orchestra or something else to automate your snapshots, a proper backup tool will still provide value, and of course can still ship your backups to S3(?)/Glacier or an Azure storage vault/blob.
I think if we are trying to share information with people who are learning, that it is good to be fair about these topics. Custom bash scripts and cron jobs can work, but lets not say that they are replacing the more mature tools or that they are going away in favor of cron jobs and scripts.
We are a linux shop, but we moved from AWS to Azure in the last couple of years
and Azure has some good documentation on exactly this - backing up on-prem to the cloud, etc. The pictures are still backup/restore. I had to double check before responding to make sure I wasn't losing it because you said 'outside of "backup and recovery"'. I don't love Microsoft and am not an Azure fan really, but if their docs are still saying it so will I.
I hope that all makes sense to you. I'm just sharing my own experience being involved in this for so long.
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Ganiman
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