So, been evaluating backup management solutions. Simple shell script won’t do good since I want auto-rotation, better scheduling and incremental backup support (storage friendly). Open source solution is a no-brainer priority. So, I’ taking bacula from bacula.org for a spin for a few days to understand how it works. So far so good. It has good scheduler with better-than-cron syntax, eg: 1st mon at 23:05 to schedule a backup on first monday of a month at 23:05. Neat eh? Installing Bacula in Ubuntu is a pretty straight forward process. There’s a fatal misconfiguration tho. It’s known and simple to fix.

The definition of the catalog Mycatalog contains a line starting with ‘ dbname = “bacula;”‘. The semicolon inside the quotes should follow the quotes, so should start with ‘ dbname = “bacula” ;’

Another tip, Pool resources by default are not enabling auto-volume naming. This is pretty annoying for a newbie. And it is way better to have it enabled by default to make it work out-of-the-box. To this, add label format option into your Pool resource definition. Something like this:

Pool {
  Name = File
  Pool Type = Backup
  Volume Use Duration = 23h
  LabelFormat = "VolFile-${Year}-${Month:p/2/0/r}-${Day:p/2/0/r}"
}

It will automagically creating proper Pool Volume when job runs, eg: Vol-2011-12-02.

You can use bat GUI to list your jobs and volumes. To restore files, see my tips here.

PS:

When you changed bacula-sd.conf, aside from restarting bacula-sd service do restart bacula-director service as well.