Bacula is another popular free backup package. Itis designed to be more modular than Amanda. Like Amanda, itrequires a client on the system to be backed up. In addition to the client, however, there is an administrative console service, a status monitor service, a backup director which controls the actual backup operations, a storage service that keeps the actual backup data, and a database service where the backup information and catalogs are mamtained. Of course, except for the client (which must reside on the systems being backed up), these services may be spread among different systems or consolidated on a single server.
Bacula configuration is object-oriented, in that you define clients, jobs, schedules jobs, file sets (to be backed up), storage pools to hold the backup data, messages (to handle emailing of reports), the catalog database, and the director which coordinates the whole thing. There are many useful functions, including some that allow restoration of a system without access to the catalog, creation of boot CDs which will allow a full, bare metal restore.
One thing to note is that the Bacula rescue CD is set up to restore disk partitions exactly as they existed at the time of the disk creation. Ifyou need to run a bare metal restore to a system with a different disk configuration, the rescue CD also provides the fdisk utility, and you can add other utilities to it ifyou wish.
The Bacula director and storage components run on Linux, FreeBSD, or Solaris. Ithas also been reported to work on some Windows versions, Mac OS/X, and other BSD variants, although this is not officially supported. The client is available for many different systems, including various Linux, Windows, Mac, and BSD systems. Bacula is also reported to work on AD<, BSDI, and HPUX systems, although this is not officially supported.
Installing Bacula on Debian is straightforward. There are packages for each of the various parts, as well as, several meta packages. The bacula meta package installs both the bacula-client and bacula-server meta packages. The client package installs the Bacula console and file daemon (client). The server package installs the Bacula director and storage packages. There are several choices for the Bacula director, depending on what database you wish to use for your catalogs. The packages may be installed either via the meta packages or individually, as desired.
As with Amanda, Bacula is a comprehensive and complex solution. Aside from the comprehensive documentation available on the Bacula web site, there are several books available that cover itwell, including one available from www.packtpub.com(Network Backup with Bacula How-to}.by Yauheni V. Pankav, pACKT Publishing). Briefly, though, Bacula uses text files for configuration, in directories under jetc/bacula. The Bacula console package provides a graphical console application, although in practice the interface is actually a command line utility.
