UrBackup and FreeNAS Jurassic Park Effect
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So in doing some testing recently with UrBackup I was amazed at how simple it was to get started with, from setting up a server and the clients to choosing what gets backed up and how to restore it.
Which comes into the conversation of, it was so simple that it was scary. Like why is everything else "more difficult" to get setup in contrast.
Does UrBackup fall into the same category as FreeNAS? Insanely simple to setup, but hiding all kinds of trouble under the hood?
Paging a few people to discuss: @scottalanmiller @dafyre @JaredBusch
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I don't know enough about UrBackup to know for sure, but it seems pretty different. FreeNAS is a "pretty face" layered on top of an existing, enterprise product. That pretty face doesn't add value, but does add risk. And shifts engineering from up front to later.
I don't believe that URB is doing any of that. It is its own product doing its own thing (AFAIK), and doesn't create a "this was easy but you have to know a lot later" to recover problem like FreeNAS does.
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The setup of it literally took under 5 minutes on a Ubuntu server (didn't want to spend for Windows licensing just for a test). Took only 3 or 4 commands and the agent installation on my desktop was insanely simple as well.
Configuring the client, took all of 30 seconds to talk to the server. From there I specified what to backup (didn't want to do my entire system) and it was working.
I felt like I needed to start drinking from just having experienced Symantec BE and other solutions that were way more difficult to get going with.
It feels as if it must be hiding something, but I have no idea how it could be. . .
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So in looking at their github, the backend project has 5 contributors (not including pull requests) and the frontend has only 1 contributor.
It just seems like such a tiny team for something that worked so well and was so simple to setup for my tests.
I'll see if I can get the lead developer to join and post here.
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I'm a fan of small team projects. Easier to feed them, easier to keep them productive and happy.
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Some things that I really like about UrBackup from my testing is that literally anyone, even a receptionist could restore items from a backup if needed.
If that same person had administrative access they could restore for anyone in the entire organization, which is great. A simple website that you dig down to whatever you want to restore from the file path and you can begin a restore.
Or you can let the users restore items themselves if need be.
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The client setup and choosing what gets backed up is also incredibly simple. Once the client is installed (windows test client) you simply add a path that gets backed up.
That's it, that Windows path is than backed up for that client.
You can add paths as well, or do everything server-side so the client is forcibly backed-up.
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The fact that there is CBT on such a tiny project is also an amazing feat, and for only $17/system I'm stumped at how there is competition.
I'd really need some heavy hardware and software systems to test this with to see what it's limitations are.
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I love that UrBackup has Chocolatey integration for Windows users.
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Someone needs to reach out to the UrBackup team and invite them to poke their heads on in over here on ML.
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@scottalanmiller said in UrBackup and FreeNAS Jurassic Park Effect:
Someone needs to reach out to the UrBackup team and invite them to poke their heads on in over here on ML.
I already did for at least Uroni who is the lead dev.
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Looks like we can manage URB via CLI too.
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It's been a while since I've given URBackup a go. I'll spin up an instance of it in my lab and see how well it works.
I know that it can work a lot like CrashPlan too... Your clients do NOT have to be onsite (or on the same IP subnet) for URBackup to work. IIRC, you specify the IP address / FQDN of the host you want the backups to go to.
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@dustinb3403 I have not used this product, but it sounds like something I need to review.
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Wondering if it could replace our Tivoli endpoint backup.
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@jaredbusch said in UrBackup and FreeNAS Jurassic Park Effect:
@dustinb3403 I have not used this product, but it sounds like something I need to review.
I'd really consider it in a lot of situations, let me know how your review goes.
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@coliver said in UrBackup and FreeNAS Jurassic Park Effect:
Wondering if it could replace our Tivoli endpoint backup.
You can use this for endpoint or server backups, it's capable of file and whole image based backups. It has a separate recovery medium to use from CD or USB as well.
It seems to cover the entire range of things that most places would need.
How it performs on huge systems is what I wonder. 100TB of data etc.
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Last time I used UrBackup was trying to replace Amanda Backup and Bacula.
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@dbeato said in UrBackup and FreeNAS Jurassic Park Effect:
Last time I used UrBackup was trying to replace Amanda Backup and Bacula.
Did you succeed?
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@dustinb3403 said in UrBackup and FreeNAS Jurassic Park Effect:
@dbeato said in UrBackup and FreeNAS Jurassic Park Effect:
Last time I used UrBackup was trying to replace Amanda Backup and Bacula.
Did you succeed?
It worked great on the web interface but it was for a small non profit organization so it works and I believe it is still working. At the time I didn't think of this limitations:
