[adepressedthrow]

I hadn't seen Amanda before. Bacularis looks like it might help with the complexity of setting up Backula. I might try that out.

It's hard to get the motivation to mess with these tools that have relatively little documentation/examples and are purely config file based.

[trynewideas]

That's fair. I used to use Ark, which was mostly a proprietary front-end for bacula, and that exposed me to the kind of futility of a "user-friendly" tape interface. Every tape operation from picking to winding to r/w takes so much time, and has so many subtle ways that it can fail, that it defies attempts at friendly user interfaces.

[herewulf]

Bacula is great software, but yes, fiddly to set up and SCSI tape drives / changers aren't really straightforward either. It will serve you well once all is set up though.

I worked for a company using Bacula quite successfully for many years with a 24 tape system. It was much better than the proprietary software the system came with.