What's a good open-source backup program?

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PatrickGSR94

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After my one and only hard drive in my 2006 PC build crashed a fiery death in June 2009, I vowed to never be without a backup solution ever again. My PC now has 2 internal HDD's, and I have one 1TB external HDD on my desk that use for backups. I purchased Acronis True Image 2009, but after 2 years of using it, it has proved itself to be a massive failure.

None of my HDD's have actually failed as of yet, but the way Acronis creates backups is just ridiculous. I set daily incrementals and weekly full backups, and even though I have it set to consolidate those incrementals every so often, it simply fills the entire 1 TB HDD space after a couple of months with subsequent backup attempts failing. So then I'm forced to delete backup archives every so often just to free up space, at the risk of losing data before the next backup is completed.

I'm pretty well fed up with Acronis and am now considering something open-source since I'd rather not have to pay hard-earned money a 2nd time for something that should have worked the 1st time. I have done a bit of searching and have heard of "Amanda" open source backup software, and also Bacula. Are either of these good or should I go with something else?

At my office we use a combination of Symantec Backup Exec (which works awesome) and a couple of incremental and full backup Robocopy script files to essentially create about 5 layers of protection. I've thought about just using robocopy scripts but I figured actual backup software might be able to do a better job of consolidating and removing old, outdated backup archives in order to preserve HDD free space.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.
 
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If you are using XP, the ntbackup software that comes with XP pro actually is decent. We are using it with a lot of servers at my work, and for the most part it does ok.

PatrickGSR94

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While that sounds good in theory, I don't know about the integrity of the archive if I just go about deleting the .TIB files directly without some sort of consolidation operation.
 

PatrickGSR94

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Well I completely reformatted my 1 TB external HDD as NTFS and set up my backup jobs again. I also updated to the latest build of Acronis TI 2009 as I think the older build was having issues. Everything worked great for a week, until yesterday morning when I got a message saying the backup job had paused and kept asking me for the location of "volume 1". Searching the web, apparently this means the backup archives are corrupted. The complete backup from 1 week ago is fine, but all the incrementals made every night this past week are bad, apparently.

So I guess it's out with this and I will try something else like that Todo software. I can't be having something that gets effed up like this after a week. :fou:
 

PatrickGSR94

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I will probably try XP's built in NT Backup and see what happens. I wasn't aware that XP included that, and my only experience was when we used to use it on our office Server 2003 machine at work. My experience there wasn't the best, but we were looking for a much more complicated backup scheme than what I will require at home.

If NTbackup gives me problems on my home machine then I'll try one of these other options mentioned here.
 
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