Introduction

Bacula is an open source network backup solution that allows you create backups and perform data recovery of your computer systems. It is very flexible and robust, which makes it, while slightly cumbersome to configure, suitable for backups in many situations. A backup system is an important component in most server infrastructures, as recovering from data loss is often a critical part of disaster recovery plans.

In this tutorial, we will show you how to install and configure the server components of Bacula on an Ubuntu 14.04 server. We will configure Bacula to perform a weekly job that creates a local backup (i.e. a backup of its own host). This, by itself, is not a particularly compelling use of Bacula, but it will provide you with a good starting point for creating backups of your other servers, i.e. the backup clients. The next tutorial in this series will cover creating backups of your other, remote, servers by installing and configuring the Bacula client, and configuring the Bacula server.

If you’d rather use CentOS 7 instead, follow this link: How To Install Bacula Server on CentOS 7.

Prerequisites

You must have superuser (sudo) access on an Ubuntu 14.04 server. Also, the server will require adequate disk space for all of the backups that you plan on retaining at any given time.

If you are using DigitalOcean, you should enable Private Networking on your Bacula server, and all of your client servers that are in the same datacenter region. This will allow your servers to use private networking when performing backups, reducing network overhead.

We will configure Bacula to use the private FQDN of our servers, e.g. bacula.private.example.com. If you don’t have a DNS setup, use the appropriate IP addresses instead. If you don’t have private networking enabled, replace all network connection information in this tutorial with network addresses that are reachable by servers in question (e.g. public IP addresses or VPN tunnels).

Let’s get started by looking at an overview of Bacula’s components.

Bacula Component Overview

Although Bacula is composed of several software components, it follows the server-client backup model; to simplify the discussion, we will focus more on the backup server and the backup clients than the individual Bacula components. Still, it is important to have cursory knowledge of the various Bacula components, so we will go over them now.

A Bacula server, which we will also refer to as the “backup server”, has these components:

• Bacula Director (DIR): Software that controls the backup and restore operations that are performed by the File and Storage daemons
• Storage Daemon (SD): Software that performs reads and writes on the storage devices used for backups
• Catalog: Services that maintain a database of files that are backed up. The database is stored in an SQL database such as MySQL or PostgreSQL
• Bacula Console: A command-line interface that allows the backup administrator to interact with, and control, Bacula Director

Note: The Bacula server 
components don't need to run on the same server, but they all work 
together to provide the backup server functionality.

A Bacula client, i.e. a server that will be backed up, runs the File Daemon (FD) component. The File Daemon is software that provides the Bacula server (the Director, specifically) access to the data that will be backed up. We will also refer to these servers as “backup clients” or “clients”.

As we noted in the introduction, we will configure the backup server to create a backup of its own filesystem. This means that the backup server will also be a backup client, and will run the File Daemon component.

Let’s get started with the installation.

Install MySQL

Bacula uses an SQL database, such as MySQL or PostreSQL, to manage its backups catalog. We will use MySQL in this tutorial.

First, update apt-get:

• sudo apt-get update

Now install MySQL Server with apt-get:

• sudo apt-get install mysql-server

You will be prompted for a password for the MySQL database administrative user, root. Enter a password, then confirm it.

Remember this password, as it will be used in the Bacula installation process.

Install Bacula

Install the Bacula server and client components, using apt-get:

• sudo apt-get install bacula-server bacula-client

You will be prompted for some information that will be used to configure Postfix, which Bacula uses:

• General Type of Mail Configuration: Choose “Internet Site”
• System Mail Name: Enter your server’s FQDN or hostname

Next, you will be prompted for information that will be used to set up the Bacula database:

• Configure database for bacula-director-mysql with dbconfig-common?: Select “Yes”
• Password of the database’s administrative user: Enter your MySQL root password (set during MySQL installation)
• MySQL application password for bacula-director-mysql: Enter a new password and confirm it, or leave the prompt blank to generate a random password

The last step in the installation is to update the permissions of a script that Bacula uses during its catalog backup job:

• sudo chmod 755 /etc/bacula/scripts/delete_catalog_backup

The Bacula server (and client) components are now installed. Let’s create the backup and restore directories.

Create Backup and Restore Directories

Bacula needs a backup directory—for storing backup archives—and restore directory—where restored files will be placed. If your system has multiple partitions, make sure to create the directories on one that has sufficient space. Continue reading Install Bacula Server on Ubuntu 14.04 →

Introduction

After coming up with a recovery plan for the various components of your application, you should set up the backup system that is required to support it. This tutorial will focus on using Bacula as a backups solution. The benefits of using a full-fledged backup system, such as Bacula, is that it gives you full control over what you back up and restore at the individual file level, and you can schedule backups and restores according to what is best for you.

Solutions such as DigitalOcean Droplet Backups (snapshot backups of your entire Droplet) are easy to set up and may be sufficient for your needs, if you only require weekly backups. If you opt for DigitalOcean Backups, be sure to set up hot backups of your database by following the Create Hot Backups of Your Database section.

In this part of the tutorial, we will set up a Bacula to maintain daily backups of the required backups of the servers that comprise your application setup (db1, app1, app2, and lb1), defined previously in our recovery plan—essentially, this is a tutorial that shows you how to use Bacula to create backups of a LAMP stack. We will also use Percona XtraBackup to create hot backups of your MySQL database. Lastly, we will use rsync to create a copy of your backups, on a server in a remote data center. This will add two servers to your setup: backups and remotebackups (located in a separate data center).

Let’s get started. Continue reading Building for Production: Web Applications — Backups →