Finally I got Bacula set up and running fine at work. Primarily I did this, because I did want to move our backup out of the main Windows 2K AD server. There I had some hardware problems with my backup tapes (2 HP DDS-3 tapes) with different SCSI controllers. It worked all nice twice or three times successively and than errors were returned. As this happened with different SCSI controllers and the tape drives worked fine in a different testing environment I decided to test these controllers and tape drives in a new computer.

Windows or Linux based solution?

Then I had to decide, whether to set up a second Windows server or set up a Linux server. One nice thing about a second Windows server would have been, that it could be a backup server of the AD. But a Windows license is more expensive than installing SuSE 9.3 from a ftp and as I'm running quite some services on the first Linux server right now, this would be the oportunity to move some things to the new server (e.g. when I'll switch to kolab2 I could do that on the second server). Further on I like open source…

Looking for a software running on Linux

So I looked for a nice backup solution, which is able to do remote backups of a Windows server. And I didn't want to do this using a Windows share as I'd like to backup home directories and want to save the ACLs too. So no chance for amanda, but I did ask for a quotation of arkeia.

Well, it's too expensive. I wouldn't have got the budget from nowhere and even if I would have, it would have felt wrong. So I remembered reading about Bacula in a recent edition of the German Linux Magazine.

Testing Bacula

First tests were quite ok. Much options, complex configurations but the manual is very good, so working slowly and deliberate I got a first set up. Using my two drives I faked an auto changer, so that both tapes would be used optimal. But trying to run a complete job, I got problems with the band width. The Windows server was just able to send about 100 KB/s which just isn't sufficient for backing up about 20 GB of data (even runnig over weeking would be a hard job). The queer thing was that in a first test I got acceptable 800 KB/s!

Update to current beta

So what to do now? I installed the current beta vesion 1.37.30, which is considered stable and will be released with minor changes as 1.38 hopefully soon. And now I got about 800 KB/s to 1200 KB/s out of my Windows server and the Linux servers were even up to 2000 KB/s!

It's running for some days now (running a full backup every Friday and a differential one Monday to Thursday). One thing I'd still like to figure out is running the differential backups not compared to the last full backup but to the one before.

Yeah, I know, that's just a question to the mailing list… ;-)

Saving special Windows data

You might thinks, that saving the state of the Windows server and the AD could be a problem. But fortunately the very good manual of bacula has a solution here. Actually bacula is able to call external programs before the backup job is run—and this even on remote hosts! So the trick is to call

ntbackup backup systemstate /F c:\systemstate.bkf

on job start.

For my backup system it's quite easy. All the important Windows based data is located on this one server (yes, we use roaming profiles and all shared data is located on network shares as well as all important personal data). All the databases of our measurement computers are copied once a day to the Windows 2K server (they have to be copied somewhere anyway, so I can do this to the server directly), and all the important configuration data is in the AD. So that' it.

Some short conclusion

Finally it seems that the old problems where some obscure problem of the combination of mainboard, scsi controller, other cards, driver, and/or operating system. I hate problems like this because they're so hard to find and solve.

If you don't mind that there isn't a nice graphical interface to bacula available (yet), I can really recommend this tool. Working in the bacula console is very fast and effective, I'd just wish some graphical browser for selecting what to backup or even more important, what to restore (if I'm just looking for one file or directory in a big tree). But hey, if you'd really need that, you could implement this on your own! ;-)