Hi, looking to use Idera CDP to hold backups of my Linode.

I can see that there are several providers out there, but I'd like to hear suggestions from people with actual hands-on knowledge with any of them.

Priorities: 1) reliability and support; 2) bandwidth; 3) price.

If the forum rules don't allow posting provider suggestions directly please PM me directly.

As a side-note: anybody have any experience with using bare-metal restore with a Linode? How does that work, anyway? Boot from Finnix and do something, install a stock image, then do something...?

We used r1softlicenses.com for a while. While their service mostly worked fine, we did have frequent issues with backups being delayed, on occasion more than 24 hours.

The problem was that when the kernel gets updated on the client servers, the backup agent will do a complete scan of each volume on the client to re-synchronize with the backup server. This takes a while, and there is a limit to how many simultaneous synchronizations the backup server can handle, so if a lot of people perform kernel upgrades around the same time everything grinds to a halt. The same applies to backup agent updates.

Another problem was that r1softlicenses.com did not permit automatic backup verifications (these are fairly resource intensive on the backup server). You can schedule one manually, but that becomes a chore and they would frequently get so low priority that they ended up never executing. In the end we found this to be unacceptable and we now have our own backup server (since about 6 months ago).

I suspect the issue is that the Idera software just isn't built to handle the number of users on a backup server that you need in order to make a profit from running a backup service.

R1softlicenses.com responded quickly to support tickets, and they were very helpful assisting with some issues we had getting the agent to run on one of our servers. We continue to buy our licenses from them.

Cool, thanks for the heads-up.

A company called Backupsy sell R1Soft licenses for $4.95. It is just a license and you'll need a large storage server too, which they sell.

I wasn't aware of Backupsy's business model (selling a small VPS + software for backups), but now I am.

Thanks!

r1softstorage.com - you can get a license AND 100GB storage vps for only $4/month - it's a new service from the Backupsy guys

Saw that and I asked them for clarification about the BMR procedure, as what they state in the FAQ is a bit confusing.

Meantime I'm with R1SoftLicenses.com.

I'm actually wanting to use Idera/R1Soft myself on my new linode and I'm wondering if it works okay with Linode? I've seen some older threads that said you had to do some workaround when it comes to something about kernel headers...is it still like that or is the install process pretty smooth with Linode and Idera?

Close enough. It's actually simple enough, except nobody actually spells it out. In fact, nobody even explains to you that Linode boots you their own version of the kernel until you actually check it

What you have to do is boot from the stock CentOS kernel instead of the Linode-supplied one. That's it. It's actually pretty simple: clicky.

Disclaimer: I'm loving Linode, but... it's Linux. It's awesome, but has a few "gotchas"

Awesome, so if my server is running Ubuntu 14.0.1LTS with the "latest 64-bit linode kernal" then I just switch it to PVGRUB for Idera? I guess I'll read up on the link you gave me, just want to make sure I don't mess up my web server I really do want to use Idera because it seems like it would be the easiest remote backup option for me.

Yeah.

It should be noted that it's not "because of Idera". Anything requires you to have kernel headers around will lead you into doing this.