Re: [Bacula-users] Bacula offsite backups (once again)

For the last few days, I've been struggling with the same problem, and I don't if my experience can help you or not, but here goes:

First of all, I have a special Admin Job that runs every day at 12:00pm, which basically sends my Catalog Backup (postgres), the bacula-dir and bacula-sd config and system files to an external storage (currently Dropbox, but soon Amazon). So if my bacula-dir or bacula-sd crashes, I can manually restore them manually from this backup.

My normal daily backups works like this: once a month I run a Full Backup of all my servers (almost 50), every Sunday I run a Diff Backup and all the other days I run a Inc Backup. All of theses backups goes to a single Tape Library configured in my bacula-sd.

My problem was that I needed to take my backup tapes to a external site, but at the same time I needed all my backups locally available for any restore needed.

The solution to my problem was: I make a Copy Job that, weekly, makes a copy of the last Full Backup or of the last Diff Backup of my clients to a second Tape Library also configured on the same bacula-sd, and I take the tapes used on those Copy Jobs to an external site. And weekly I bring those tapes back and make them available to future Copy Jobs (their retention time are 8 days).

That way, in case a meteor falls down on my company, I'll need to manually revive the bacula-sd and bacula-dir from the Dropbox backup, and then use the Copy Jobs tapes to restore the files from last week.

Sorry if I didn't made my self very clear, but you can always contact me personally for further explanations.

2011/4/11 Bart Swedrowski <bart AT timedout DOT org>

I have successfully been using Bacula for almost 2 years now. Fairly
small (~30 machines) and straight forward setup -- only one director,
one SD.

A need has arisen to start doing offsite backups. Now, what seems
like pretty trivial task, came out to be major headache.

I went through mailing list and it seems that most of the people are
using rsync based shipping of Bacula volumes off-site and if needed,
bscan them or even keep a copy of Director as a standby one in case of
disaster. This kind of approach could work for me, however:
a) in case of SD death, I won't be able to simply login to bconsole
and start restoring jobs; it will require some manual fiddling before
I will be able to do that
b) it will substantially limit flexibility; how would you configure in
this case to eg. do local backups every day, however remote -- offsite
backup -- say, every three days using this approach? Theoretically
you could use SQL to list volumes you need to copy over, but then
again -- a)

Given lack of possibility of using COPY job across two different SDs
(with dependencies respect), my initial thought was to simply back up
twice, first time to local and second time to offsite SD. However, I
read numerous posts saying that if SD dies, Bacula most likely won't
be able to do restore basing on only one SD (it will want to use both;
unless the other one is going to be Full only which is going to be
massive waste of space).

I was wondering if anyone manage to find a solution that addresses a)
and b) and is not rsync based?

Kind regards,
Bart

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