Archiving solution

I just got a new machine from my employer (and the payer for my nice fast SDSL connection - inSORS; we do high-end video conferencing software), so I'm changing the roles of the various machines I have. One is a overclocked (clear to 800mhz - woo hoo!) Pentium, that I bought a big, cheap hard drive for, thinking to turn it into a backup server. I was looking at some Windows solutions, but realized that FreeBSD would be a better idea. The Light Dawns over Marblehead, eh?

Anyway, I looked at Bacula, and it looks exactly like what I need. Most of the machines on my network (I have 6 machines here now!) are Windows machines, except for this server (FreeBSD natch) and a dual-booting machine that I use for gaming (WinXP) and Linux development (RedHat 7.4 - part of our video conferencing solution is a server that runs on Linux). So I needed flexible clients, and Bacula does that very well.

It looks like a very complete solution - which of course means some complexity as well. So I'm going to take it slow and give it a whirl. Another thing I'm going to do on the new FreeBSD machine is to install X Windows - like I need another admin headache!

Port description for sysutils/bacula

Here's a nice page from FreeBSDDiary.org on how to set up and run Bacula:

http://www.freebsddiary.org/bacula.php