How safe proof is bacula?

Altiris · 04-14-2014, 10:03 AM

I've been using bacula for a while now and while it does work and is customizable, what happens to my backup is bacula doesn't work or if the hard drive that had the os installed was completely wiped clean? Could I just reinstall the OS and bacula and bring the backup file over and it would still work?

Habitual · 04-14-2014, 11:07 AM

That scenario is exactly why I bailed on bacula, proprietary archive format.

but yes, I believe what you described is the correct process for a restoration of a bacula host, assuming the bacula-specific files all got restored to their original locations.

catkin · 04-14-2014, 12:58 PM

My bacula build puts everything (except the virtual tapes) under /var/opt/bacula as recommended by the bacula developers.

My off-site backup contains /var/opt/bacula and the virtual tapes.

When I had a sudden disk crash, I installed the OS on a new disk, used rsync to restore /var/opt/bacula and the virtual tapes.

Recovery was then straightforward except for the NIC chip being too new for the old OS (I had previously been running a later kernel); without a local IP address, bacula would not start; re-configuring it to use the loopback address solved that.

Altiris · 04-15-2014, 08:42 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by catkin

My bacula build puts everything (except the virtual tapes) under /var/opt/bacula as recommended by the bacula developers.

My off-site backup contains /var/opt/bacula and the virtual tapes.

When I had a sudden disk crash, I installed the OS on a new disk, used rsync to restore /var/opt/bacula and the virtual tapes.

Recovery was then straightforward except for the NIC chip being too new for the old OS (I had previously been running a later kernel); without a local IP address, bacula would not start; re-configuring it to use the loopback address solved that.

Alright cool then. One thing I find strange though is that they would set /var/opt/bacula as the recommended location. Wouldn't that mean that the backup would be kept on the same hard drive that the OS is on? I keep my backups on a second hard drive so where should I keep those and what type of permissions such as I put on that location? The permissions I have right now are user:nobody with no access but then I have group:Admins with full access.

catkin · 04-19-2014, 01:28 AM

Sorry for the delay -- it took a while to dig up the references.

The strong recommendation to build into a single directory is in the version 5.0.1 release notes (which were included with the all the 5.x series release notes including the last release at the time of writing, 5.2.13). References: http://www.bacula.org/git/cgit.cgi/b...Release-5.2.13 and http://sourceforge.net/p/bacula/mail...ewmonth=201002. Extract:

Code:

5.  The Bacula project strongly recommends that you install Bacula into a
single directory, with a few minor exceptions such as the MySQL or
PostgreSQL databases.  Preferrably this should be /opt/bacula.
...
Obviously, the email, and some of the minor options (mysql, postgresql,
...) can be changed to suit your distribution, but the directory names
defined above are strongly recommended, and over time the default values in
the bacula-dir.conf and bacula-sd.conf will reflect these choices.

If you have any questions about this or would like a detailed document
describing our recommendations including packaging requirements, please
send an email to the bacula-devel list.

I asked about this recommendation on the bacula-devel mailing list and got two replies including one from Ken Sibbald who leads the bacula project: https://www.mail-archive.com/bacula-.../msg06093.html and https://www.mail-archive.com/bacula-.../msg06094.html

Given that it is such a strong recommendation, it is strange that it is not in the main 5.x documentation and not in the release notes for the recent 7.x releases (I have not read the main 7.x documentation). Perhaps the bacula project takes the view that only packagers need this information and they are capable of finding it in old release notes ... ?

If you want to put your backups on a different HDD from the OS, there is nothing about installing to /opt/bacula to prevent that. /opt/bacula could be a mount point for a file system on a different HDD from the OS.

Regards ownerships and permissions, you can set it up so only root has access. Strictly speaking only the bacula-fd process needs to be run with root privileges but it's simple to use root for all the bacula daemons.