[SAGE] Backup for small development network

[Jason Antman <jason@jasonantman.com>]

Hi,

Quick intro - I'm a IT major at Rutgers University, NJ, USA and a
part-time programmer and campus rep for Sun.

I have a network running at home composed of about 10 Linux boxes.
Mostly software development work, web server, mail server, etc. It's all
just mine, so the amount of new content each day is relatively low. I
also have six machines off-site which perform full backups of *really*
important stuff (compressed, about 15MB each) via SFTP.

For the past 2-3 years I've been doing nightly backups to disk via
really crude shell scripts, and putting that to DLT-IV or DDS4 manually
once a week. I'm now living down at school, so the tape runs haven't
been getting done. I'm also planning on adding a few Solaris boxes to
the network, and moving some of the Linux boxes over to OpenSolaris 10.

So, I'm looking for a real backup solution. I looked into Amanda, but
didn't particularly care for it. I thought I'd settled on Bacula, but
after 8 hours of hacking config files, it seems like far too high a
level of complexity for a dozen machines with most storage to networked
disks, and just weekly tape runs to the same few tapes (and no autoloader).

Any suggestions for something a bit easier than Bacula but still
functional in a network environment? I looked around for quite a while
for Bacula config file generators or really in-depth config file
examples, but it still seems a bit too heavy-weight for a small
application with (arguably) non-critical data.

Thanks for any suggestions,
Jason Antman