Good backup/recovery software for Linux

I looked around the commercial tape backup software solutions for Linux and I found them all to be quite expensive really. Fine if you're a large organisation, but if you're a small business, but have a lot of client machines to back up, then the total cost of client+server licences can be more than the entire cost of your tape drive and all the tape media ! I think it's ridiculous there isn't a cheap client/server commercial backup solution for Linux, though I'd love to be proved wrong.

What I settled on, instead, was by far the best free one for Linux - Amanda - but it can be a fiddly to get setup right (certain ports such as 10080 need to be open and it doesn't always play nicely through firewalls, but you probably don't want to be backing up through firewalls anyway, do you?). It can support dump/restore or tar, and tape changers, but be warned that if you're expecting the grandfather/father/son system (which I think is an inefficient way of using tapes and is prone to overwearing certain tapes), you'll have to kludge the config a fair bit to force such a scheme.

Amanda mixes full and incremental backups from different servers on the same tape by default (and it's clever at promoting incrementals to full backups when there's enough space on the tape available), which I have no problem with personally, but some people would scream in terror at that :) What I did have to do though, was write a recovery script for our particular setup because although there is a recovery command ("amrecover") to unpack a particular server/disk from a particular tape already in the drive, there's no higher level script to search for the server/disk/directory in your set of tapes, list all the tapes with that on, prompt you for which tape you want to use, autoload that tape in and then extract from that tape (plus loop around again for incrementals if needed). I might try to genericise that script and contribute it back to the Amanda folks at some point - it's a weak area of recovery "friendliness" in Amanda at the moment.

Also note that I wrote my own script to load and unload tapes using an autoloader (basically, a wrapper around the mtx command, but also delving into the next expected tape for the overnight backups) and I also have a "mapping" fiile to map autoloader barcodes to Amanda tape labels (because we don't keep the two the same). The combination of these means I can "unloadtape" and it'll take the tape out of the drive and put it in the next free slot in the autoloader (with barcodes, tape slot ordering in the autoloader doesn't matter) and "loadtape [optional_Amanda_label]" will load tonight's backup tape (or the one specified if supplied) from the autoloader into the drive. Hence, when I cron'ed up the Amanda system, my main dumping script called loadtape *first* before then running "amcheck". BTW, tip for UK users - make your autoloader tape changing day Tuesday...that way you don't have problems with UK Bank Holiday Mondays...