Below, we will discuss restoring files with the Console Restore command, which is the recommended way of doing it. However, there is a standalone program named bextract, which also permits restoring files. For more information on this program, please see the Bacula Utility Programs chapter of this manual. You will also want to look at the bls program in the same chapter, which allows you to list the contents of your Volumes. Finally, if you have an old Volume that is no longer in the catalog, you can restore the catalog entries using the program named bscan, documented in the same Bacula Utility Programs chapter.
In general, to restore a file or a set of files, you must run a restore job. That is a job with Type = Restore. As a consequence, you will need a predefined restore job in your bacula-dir.conf (Director's config) file. The exact parameters (Client, FileSet, ...) that you define are not important as you can either modify them manually before running the job or if you use the restore command, explained below, they will be automatically set for you.
Since Bacula is a network backup program, you must be aware that when you restore files, it is up to you to ensure that you or Bacula have selected the correct Client and the correct hard disk location for restoring those files. Bacula will quite willingly backup client A, and restore it by sending the files to a different directory on client B. Normally, you will want to avoid this, but assuming the operating systems are not too different in their file structures, this should work perfectly well, if so desired.
Since Bacula maintains a catalog of your files and on which Volumes (disk or tape), they are stored, it can do most of the bookkeeping work, allowing you simply to specify what kind of restore you want (current, before a particular date), and what files to restore. Bacula will then do the rest.
This is accomplished using the restore command in the Console. First you select the kind of restore you want, then Bacula Once the JobIds are selected, the File records for those Jobs are placed in an internal Bacula directory tree, and the restore enters a file selection mode that allows you to interactively walk up and down the file tree selecting individual files to be restored. This mode is somewhat similar to the standard Unix restore program's interactive file selection mode.
Within the Console program, after entering the restore command, you are presented with the following selection prompt:
First you select one or more JobIds that contain files
to be restored. You will be presented several methods
of specifying the JobIds. Then you will be allowed to
select which files from those JobIds are to be restored.
To select the JobIds, you have the following choices:
1: List last 20 Jobs run
2: List Jobs where a given File is saved
3: Enter list of JobIds to select
4: Enter SQL list command
5: Select the most recent backup for a client
6: Select backup for a client before a specified time
7: Enter a list of files to restore
8: Enter a list of files to restore before a specified time
9: Cancel
Select item: (1-9):
As an example, suppose that we select item 5 (restore to most recent state). It will then ask for the desired Client, which on my system, will print all the Clients found in the database as follows:
Defined clients:
1: Rufus
2: Matou
3: Polymatou
4: Minimatou
5: Minou
6: MatouVerify
7: PmatouVerify
8: RufusVerify
9: Watchdog
Select Client (File daemon) resource (1-9):
You will probably have fare fewer Clients than this example, and if you have only one Client, it will be automatically selected, but in this case, I enter Rufus to select the Client. Then Bacula needs to know what FileSet is to be restored, so it prompts with:
The defined FileSet resources are:
1: Full Set
2: Kerns Files
Select FileSet resource (1-2):
I choose item 1, which is my full backup. Normally, you will only have a single FileSet for each Job, and if your machines are similar (all Linux) you may only have one FileSet for all your Clients.
At this point, Bacula has all the information it needs to find the most recent set of backups. It will then query the database, which may take a bit of time, and it will come up with something like the following. Note, some of the columns are truncated here for presentation:
+-------+------+----------+-------------+-------------+------+-------+------------+ | JobId | Levl | JobFiles | StartTime | VolumeName | File | SesId | VolSesTime | +-------+------+----------+-------------+-------------+------+-------+------------+ | 1,792 | F | 128,374 | 08-03 01:58 | DLT-19Jul02 | 67 | 18 | 1028042998 | | 1,792 | F | 128,374 | 08-03 01:58 | DLT-04Aug02 | 0 | 18 | 1028042998 | | 1,797 | I | 254 | 08-04 13:53 | DLT-04Aug02 | 5 | 23 | 1028042998 | | 1,798 | I | 15 | 08-05 01:05 | DLT-04Aug02 | 6 | 24 | 1028042998 | +-------+------+----------+-------------+-------------+------+-------+------------+ You have selected the following JobId: 1792,1792,1797 Building directory tree for JobId 1792 ... Building directory tree for JobId 1797 ... Building directory tree for JobId 1798 ... cwd is: / $
Depending on the number of JobFiles for each JobId, the Building directory tree ...`` can take a bit of time.
In our example, Bacula found four Jobs that comprise the most recent backup of the specified Client and FileSet. Two of the Jobs have the same JobId because that Job wrote on two different Volumes. The third Job was an incremental backup to the previous Full backup, and it only saved 254 Files compared to 128,374 for the Full backup. The fourth Job was also an incremental backup that saved 15 files.
Next Bacula entered those Jobs into the directory tree, with no files marked to be restored as a default, tells you how many files are in the tree, and tells you what the current working directory (cwd) is /. Finally, Bacula prompts with the dollar sign ($) to indicate that you may enter commands to move around the directory tree and to select files.
Instead of choosing item 5 on the first menu (Select the most recent backup for a client), if we had chosen item 3 (Enter list of JobIds to select) and we had entered the JobIds 1792,1797,1798 we would have arrived at the same point.
One point to note if you are manually entering JobIds is that you must enter them in the order they were run (generally in increasing JobId order). If you enter them out of order and the same file was saved in two or more of the Jobs, you may end up with an old version of that file (i.e. not the most recent).
While in file selection mode, you can enter help or a question mark (?) to produce a summary of the available commands:
Command Description ======= =========== cd change current directory count count marked files in and below the cd dir list current directory done leave file selection mode estimate estimate restore size exit exit = done find find files -- wildcards allowed help print help ls list current directory -- wildcards allowed lsmark list the marked files in and below the cd mark mark file to be restored markdir mark directory entry to be restored -- nonrecursive pwd print current working directory unmark unmark file to be restored unmarkdir unmark directory -- no recursion quit quit ? print help
As a default no files have been selected for restore. If you want to restore everything, at this point, you should enter mark *, and then done and Bacula will write the bootstrap records to a file and request your approval to start a restore job.
If you do not enter the above mentioned mark * command, you will start with an empty slate. Now you can simply start looking at the tree and mark particular files or directories if you want restored. It is easy to make a mistake in specifying a file to mark or unmark, and Bacula's error handling is not perfect, so please check your work by using the ls or dir commands to see what files are actually selected. Any selected file has its name preceded by an asterisk.
To check what is marked or not marked, enter the count command, which displays:
128401 total files. 128401 marked to be restored.
Each of the above commands will be described in more detail in the next section. We continue with the above example, having accepted to restore all files as Bacula set by default. On entering the done command, Bacula prints:
Bootstrap records written to /home/kern/bacula/working/restore.bsr The restore job will require the following Volumes: DLT-19Jul02 DLT-04Aug02 128401 files selected to restore. Run Restore job JobName: kernsrestore Bootstrap: /home/kern/bacula/working/restore.bsr Where: /tmp/bacula-restores Replace: always FileSet: Kerns Files Client: Rufus Storage: SDT-10000 JobId: *None* OK to run? (yes/mod/no):
Please examine each of the items very carefully to make sure that they are correct. In particular, look at Where, which tells you where in the directory structure the files will be restored, and Client, which tells you which client will receive the files. These items will not always be completed with the correct values depending on which of the restore options you chose.
The above assumes that you have defined a Restore Job resource in your Director's configuration file. Normally, you will only need one Restore Job resource definition because by its nature, restoring is a manual operation, and using the Console interface, you will be able to modify the Restore Job to do what you want.
An example Restore Job resource definition is given below.
Returning to the above example, you should verify that the Client name is correct before running the Job. However, you may want to modify some of the parameters of the restore job. For example, in addition to checking the Client it is wise to check that the Storage device chosen by Bacula is indeed correct. Although the FileSet is shown, it will be ignored in restore. The restore will choose the files to be restored either by reading the Bootstrap file, or if not specified, it will restore all files associated with the specified backup JobId (i.e. the JobId of the Job that originally backed up the files).
Finally before running the job, please note that the default location for restoring files is not their original locations, rather the directory /tmp/bacula-restores. You can change this default by modifying your bacula-dir.conf file, or you can modify it using the mod option. If you want to restore the files to their original location, you must have Where set to nothing or to the root, i.e. /.
If you now enter yes, Bacula will run the restore Job. The Storage daemon will first request Volume DLT-19Jul02 and after the appropriate files have been restored from that volume, it will request Volume DLT-04Aug02.
If you have a small number of files to restore, and you know the filenames, you can either put the list of filenames in a file to be read by Bacula, or you can enter the names one at a time. The filenames must include the full path and filename. No wild cards are used.
To enter the files, after the restore, you select item number 7 from the prompt list:
To select the JobIds, you have the following choices:
1: List last 20 Jobs run
2: List Jobs where a given File is saved
3: Enter list of JobIds to select
4: Enter SQL list command
5: Select the most recent backup for a client
6: Select backup for a client before a specified time
7: Enter a list of files to restore
8: Enter a list of files to restore before a specified time
9: Cancel
Select item: (1-9): 7
which then prompts you with for the client name:
Defined Clients:
1: Timmy
2: Tibs
3: Rufus
Select the Client (1-3): 3
Of course, your client list will be different, and if you have only one client, it will be automatically selected. And finally, Bacula requests you to enter a filename:
Enter filename:
At this point, you can enter the full path and filename
Enter filename: /home/kern/bacula/k/Makefile.in Enter filename:
as you can see, it took the filename. If Bacula cannot find a copy of the file, it prints the following:
Enter filename: junk filename No database record found for: junk filename Enter filename:
If you want Bacula to read the filenames from a file, you simply precede the filename with a less-than symbol (<). When you have entered all the filenames, you enter a blank line, and Bacula will write the bootstrap file, tell you what tapes will be used, and propose a Restore job to be run:
Enter filename: Automatically selected Storage: DDS-4 Bootstrap records written to /home/kern/bacula/working/restore.bsr The restore job will require the following Volumes: test1 1 file selected to restore. Run Restore job JobName: kernsrestore Bootstrap: /home/kern/bacula/working/restore.bsr Where: /tmp/bacula-restores Replace: always FileSet: Kerns Files Client: Rufus Storage: DDS-4 When: 2003-09-11 10:20:53 Priority: 10 OK to run? (yes/mod/no):
It is possible to automate the selection by file by putting your list of files in say /tmp/file-list, then using the following command:
restore client=Rufus file=</tmp/file-list
If in modifying the parameters for the Run Restore job, you find that Bacula asks you to enter a Job number, this is because you have no yet specified either a Job number or a Bootstrap file. Simply entering zero will allow you to continue and to select another option to be modified.
If all the above sounds complicated, you will probably agree that it really isn't after trying it a few times. It is possible to do everything that was shown above, with the exception of selecting the FileSet, by using command line arguments with a single command by entering:
restore client=Rufus select current all done yes
The client=Rufus specification will automatically select Rufus as the client, the current tells Bacula that you want to restore the system to the most current state possible, and the yes suppresses the final yes/mod/no prompt and simply runs the restore.
The full list of possible command line arguments are:
Depending how you do the restore, you may or may not get the directory entries back to their original state. Here are a few of the problems you can encounter, and for same machine restores, how to avoid them.
If you are restoring on WinNT/2K/XP systems, Bacula will restore the files with the original ownerships and permissions as would be expected. This is also true if you are restoring those files to an alternate directory (using the Where option in restore). However, if the alternate directory does not already exist, the Bacula File daemon (Client) will create it, and since the File daemon runs under the SYSTEM account, the directory will be created with SYSTEM ownership and permissions. In this case, you may have problems accessing the newly restored files.
To avoid this problem, you can create the alternate directory before doing the restore. Bacula will not change the ownership and permissions of the directory if it is already created as long as it is not one of the directories being restored (i.e. written to tape).
Restoring files is generally much slower than backing it up for several reasons. The first is that during a backup the tape is normally already positioned and Bacula need only write. On the other hand, because restoring files is done so rarely, Bacula keeps only the he start file and block on the tape for the whole job rather than on a file by file basis which would use quite a lot of space in the catalog.
Bacula versions 1.31a and older would seek to the first file on the first tape, then sequentially search the tape for the specified files. If you were doing a full restore, this is OK, but if you want to restore one or two files, the process could be quite long.
This deficiency has been corrected in version 1.32. The consequence is that Bacula will forward space to the correct file mark on the tape for the Job, then forward space to the correct block, and finally sequentially read each record until it gets to the correct one(s) for the file or files you want to restore. Once the desired files are restored, Bacula will stop reading the tape. For restoring a small number of files, version 1.32 and greater are hundreds of times faster than previous versions.
Finally, instead of just reading a file for backup, during the restore, Bacula must create the file, and the operating system must allocate disk space for the file as Bacula is restoring it.
For all the above reasons the restore process is generally much slower than backing up.
The most frequent problems users have restoring files are error messages such as:
04-Jan 00:33 z217-sd: RestoreFiles.2005-01-04_00.31.04 Error: block.c:868 Volume data error at 20:0! Short block of 512 bytes on device /dev/tape discarded.
or
04-Jan 00:33 z217-sd: RestoreFiles.2005-01-04_00.31.04 Error: block.c:264 Volume data error at 20:0! Wanted ID: "BB02", got ".". Buffer discarded.
Both these kinds of messages indicate that you were probably running your tape drive in fixed block mode rather than variable block mode. Fixed block mode will work with any program that reads tapes sequentially such as tar, but Bacula repositions the tape on a block basis when restoring files because this will speed up the restore by orders of magnitude when only a few files are restore. There are several ways that you can attempt to recover from this unfortunate situation.
Try the following things each separately, and reset your Device resource to what it is now after each individual test:
Job {
Name = "RestoreFiles"
Type = Restore
Client = Any-client
FileSet = "Any-FileSet"
Storage = Any-storage
Where = /tmp/bacula-restores
Messages = Standard
Pool = Default
}
If Where is not specified, the default location for restoring files will be their original locations.
After you have selected the Jobs to be restored and Bacula has created the in-memory directory tree, you will enter file selection mode as indicated by the dollar sign ($) prompt. While in this mode, you may use the commands listed above. The basic idea is to move up and down the in memory directory structure with the cd command much as you normally do on the system. Once you are in a directory, you may select the files that you want restored. As a default no files are marked to be restored. If you wish to start with all files, simply enter: cd / and mark *. Otherwise proceed to select the files you wish to restore by marking them with the mark command. The available commands are:
Note, on Windows systems, the various drives (c:, d:, ...) are treated like a directory within the file tree while in the file selection mode. As a consequence, you must do a cd c: or possibly in some cases a cd C: (note upper case) to get down to the first directory.
After executing the mark command, it will print a brief summary:
No files marked.
If no files were marked, or:
nn files marked.
if some files are marked.