Critical Items to Implement Before Going Production

General

We recommend you take your time before implementing a Bacula backup system since Bacula is a rather complex program, and if you make a mistake, you may suddenly find that you cannot restore the your files in case of a disaster. This is especially true if you have not previously used a major backup product.

If you follow the instructions in this chapter, you will have covered most of the major problems that can occur. It goes without saying that if ever you find that we have left out an important point, please point it out to us, so that we can document it to the benefit of everyone.

Critical Items

The following assumes that you have installed Bacula, you more or less understand it, you have at least worked through the tutorial or have equivalent experience, and that you have setup a basic production configuration. If you haven't done the above, please do so then come back here. The following is a sort of checklist that points you elsewhere in the manual with perhaps a brief explaination of why you should do it. The order is more or less the order you would use in setting up a production system (if you already are in production, use the checklist anyway).

• Test your tape drive with compatibility with Bacula by using the test command in the btape program.
• Better than doing the above is to walk through the nine steps in the Tape Testing chapter of the manual. It may take you a bit of time, but it will eliminate surprises.
• Make sure that /lib/tls is disabled. Bacula does not work with this library. See the second point under Supported Operating Systems.
• Do at least one restore of files. If you backup both Unix and Win32 systems, restore files from each system type. The Restoring Files chapter shows you how.
• Write a bootstrap file to a separate system for each backup job. The Write Bootstrap directive is described in the Director Configuration chapter of the manual, and more details are available in the Bootstrap File chapter. Also, the default bacula-dir.conf comes with a Write Bootstrap directive defined. This allows you to recover the state of your system as of the last backup.
• Backup your catalog. An example of this is found in the default bacula-dir.conf file. The backup script is installed by default and should handle any database, though you may want to make your own local modifications.
• Write a bootstrap file for the catalog. An example of this is found in the default bacula-dir.conf file. This will allow you to quickly restore your catalog in the event it is wiped out - otherwise it is many excruciating hours of work.
• Make a Bacula Rescue CDROM! See the Disaster Recovery Using a Bacula Rescue CDROM chapter. It is trivial to make such a CDROM, and it can make system recovery in the event of a lost hard disk infinitely easier.

Recommended Items

Although these items may not be critical, they are recommended and will help you avoid problems.

• Read the Quick Start Guide to Bacula
• After installing and experimenting with Bacula, read and work carefully through the examples in the Tutorial chapter of this manual.
• Learn what each of the Bacula Utility Programs does.
• Set up reasonable retention periods so that your catalog does not grow to be too big. See the following three chapters:
  Recycling your Volumes,
  Basic Volume Management,
  Using Pools to Manage Volumes.
• Perform a bare metal recovery using the Bacula Rescue CDROM. See the Disaster Recovery Using a Bacula Rescue CDROM chapter.