bacula.md

Backup system.

Contains 5 components all of which may optionally reside on separate machines:

1. "file server/daemon": an app that reads files from data source and transfers to a storage server.
2. "storage server", storage: reads data from a file server and writes to the backup storage (disk, tape, etc).
3. "database server", catalog: a catalogue of backups/files on the storage server.
4. "backup server", director: an app controlling services operation and running schedules.
5. Tray monitor and console: administration clients.

Configuration

Syntax

It is awkward.

Configuration consists mainly of paragraphs written as ParName {…}. E.g. FileSet {…}. Paragraph content is either another paragraph or a key = val assignment. Whitespace is mainly insignificant, except for the key = val oddity.

key = val is where the fun begins. Both key and val allow inserting spaces inside, Bacula just strips them. So e.g. Name = XY and N a m e = X Y end up being same thing. Then, whenever you want to avoid space being stripped from val, you can enclose them to double quotes, e.g. Name = "X Y". But for some reason, double quotes are not supported for "key" part, Bacula would just bail out if you tried writing "Name" = XY.

bacula-dir.conf

• Director
• Job: a backup, restore or other operation for Bacula to perform. May refer to FileSet, JobDefs, Pool. It may not write to a volume but to a pool.
• JobDefs: "job defaults", a template for Job. May refer to Schedule.
• FileSet: files to back up. Referred to by Job
• Schedule: time when job gets run.
• Client: connection config for a "file service".
• Autochanger: Idk exactly, but it's something about grouping multiple storage devices into a single unit.
• Catalog: connection config for a "database service".
• Messages: logging: things to go to email and to log, separately.
• Console: console configs, may be restricted in different ways for e.g. just status monitoring.
• Pool: a group of "volumes".
  • A volume is a storage device like a disk or a tape and it may not be referred directly by a job.

Misc

• "Restoring": done with restore command which uses "jobid" of the jobs log to restore from. But for some reason it also requires a Job with Type = Restore to be present, otherwise restore won't work. In particular, the FileSet directive is completely ignored (but required to be present), and instead you'd have to manually chose which files you want to restore.

Gotchas

• Don't confuse jobs and jobs! Already confused, are you? In Bacula the top-level thing represented by Job { config paragraph is called a job. And then if you ran a job multiple times, its history entries are called jobs as well! So when you see word "job" it may mean any of those concepts.

• Increasing a pool size won't propagate to volumes till you exec update volume in console.

• If you don't start postgresql before installing Bacula, then initial installation will get completely screwed up on the database side. Bacula says that to fix this you'd have to run some dbconfig-common after starting postgresql service, but Idk where this script (or even if it's a single script or a group).

  So happened that I didn't know any of that, so below is my unfinished research on how to fix this. The errors below are fixed in sudo -u postgres psql. You'll be getting:

  1. Unable to connect to PostgreSQL server. This is because it didn't create a user that's written in the config. Fix with create user bacula password 'insert_pswd';
  2. Unable to connect to PostgreSQL server. This time it's because it didn't create a database, fix with create DATABASE bacula;

  There will be more errors, but at that point I decided to completely remove the Podman/Docker image with bacula to get it reinstalled. Worth noting that simply apt purge bacula and reinstalling it won't be enough, it leaves some configs at random places that you'd have to search for. Yeah, that sucks.

• For most usecases Bacula will be non-functional till you assign a non-localhost IP address to SD in both bacula-sd.conf's SDAddress and in bacula-dir.conf's Storage { … Address = …}. This is because SD don't typically run on the same host as the client. "Why does that matter?" you might wonder. Well, it turns out during backup or restore a client will be communicated a SD's address, so they can exchange data. This alone makes sense, so that director isn't a bottleneck; what doesn't though is that director can't establish connection channel between the two, instead it simply sends whatever's written in the config and gives 0 useful information if that's not gonna work.

• Options inside FileSet are semicolon-separated. The gotcha here is the separator is completely undocumented, and if you try to separate them by a space (because why not, docs just say it's a list but not X-separated), Bacula will simply ignore text past the first option. IOW, it would look like everything works, but it actually doesn't.

  Another valid separator is a newline (semicolon in this case is not necessary).