Re: [Bacula-users] Two installation problems, btape & bacula-fd

Early this month Arno Lehmann responded to my question about a puzzling error I got when I tried to run the test job described in section 9 of the Bacula manual.

Arno: I just found time to try again, and got different by similarly puzzling results.

I took your advice to run bacula-dir in the foreground with a trace. To cut to the chase, it worked perfectly. I got a backup of my home folder, and was able to restore it.

I noticed that bconsole said "Backup OK - with warnings." Looking upward in the bconsole output, I found a line that said, "Non-fatal FD errors: 1." Further upward, under the "label" command, I found "Could not stat /home/jonathan/.gvfs: ERR=Permission denied." (As before, bconsole was running as a superuser.)

My next step should be to repeat the test under the original conditions, where it failed, to see if it fails again. To reproduce the original conditions I need to run the scripts drop_bacula_tables and make_bacula_tables described in the documentation (section 9.5). But on my system they apparently do not exist. I searched the whole file system for them and found nothing.

I tried repeating the original test anyway. It said it succeeded, but it didn't write anything -- I think because it was supposed to be creating an incremental backup and nothing had changed, although I had deleted the original full backup in the meantime. I wish this test had been more conclusive, but it is not my most immediate concern.

At this point I need to ask four groups of questions.

FIRST: what should I make of the "Permission denied" message? Is it cause for concern, and if it is, what can I do about it?

SECOND: what should I make of the fact that the test which previously failed now succeeds, for an unknown reason? This makes me feel very insecure, since the failure could happen again at any time, and if it does I still won't know why.

THIRD: the missing scripts, and some of the earlier problems I had, make me suspect that my Bacula distribution (installed from one of the official Ubuntu repositories) is incomplete. I wonder what to do about that. Perhaps I should rebuild Bacula from the source distribution, but I am very hesitant about that. I am new to Linux, and have never built a Linux application, and do not know what is involved. Maybe it would be easy. Maybe it would create problems much bigger than the ones I am wrestling with now.

FOURTH: I wonder whether I should be doing this at all. My goal is not to master Bacula; it is to do software development in Linux. Establishing a backup and restore capability is just one part of that task, and it is taking far more time and work than I expected. And I know that when I solve the problems now before me, I will not be done; I will still have to make Bacula work with tape, master the skills of creating and restoring full, incremental, and differential backups reliably, and learn how to create and restore a disaster recovery backup. Any of those steps could raise problems comparable to the ones I have already faced, and only partly solved.

Maybe Bacula is telling me that it is not right for me; I should choose some other, simpler backup program. Or maybe I shouldn't be trying to use Linux without having an expert on call. What would you advise?

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