Introduction

This tutorial will show you how to set up Bacula to create backups of a remote Ubuntu 14.04 host, over a network connection. This involves installing and configuring the Bacula Client software on a remote host, and making some additions to the configuration of an existing Bacula Server (covered in the prerequisites).

If you are trying to create backups of CentOS 7 hosts, follow this link instead: How To Back Up a CentOS 7 Server with Bacula.

Prerequisites

This tutorial assumes that you have a server running the Bacula Server components, as described in this link: How To Install Bacula Server on Ubuntu 14.04.

We are also assuming that you are using private network interfaces for backup server-client communications. We will refer to the private FQDN of the servers (FQDNs that point to the private IP addresses). If you are using IP addresses, simply substitute the connection information where appropriate.

For the rest of this tutorial, we will refer to the Bacula Server as “BaculaServer”, “Bacula Server”, or “Backup Server”. We will refer to the remote host, that is being backed up, as “ClientHost”, “Client Host”, or “Client”.

Let’s get started by making some quick changes to the Bacula Server configuration.

Organize Bacula Director Configuration (Server)

On your Bacula Server, perform this section once.

When setting up your Bacula Server, you may have noticed that the configuration files are excessively long. We’ll try and organize the Bacula Director configuration a bit, so it uses separate files to add new configuration such as jobs, file sets, and pools.

Let’s create a directory to help organize the Bacula configuration files:

• sudo mkdir /etc/bacula/conf.d

Then open the Bacula Director configuration file:

• sudo vi /etc/bacula/bacula-dir.conf

At the end of the file add, this line:

@|"find /etc/bacula/conf.d -name '*.conf' -type f -exec echo @{} \;"

Save and exit. This line makes the Director look in the /etc/bacula/conf.d directory for additional configuration files to append. That is, any .conf file added in there will be loaded as part of the configuration.

Add RemoteFile Pool

We want to add an additional Pool to our Bacula Director configuration, which we’ll use to configure our remote backup jobs.

Open the conf.d/pools.conf file:

• sudo vi /etc/bacula/conf.d/pools.conf

Add the following Pool resource:

Pool {
  Name = RemoteFile
  Pool Type = Backup
  Label Format = Remote-
  Recycle = yes                       # Bacula can automatically recycle Volumes
  AutoPrune = yes                     # Prune expired volumes
  Volume Retention = 365 days         # one year
    Maximum Volume Bytes = 50G          # Limit Volume size to something reasonable
  Maximum Volumes = 100               # Limit number of Volumes in Pool
}

Save and exit. This defines a “RemoteFile” pool, which we will use by the backup job that we’ll create later. Feel free to change any of the parameters to meet your own needs. Continue reading Back Up an Ubuntu 14.04 Server with Bacula →