Bareos

WORK IN PROGRESS
Do not trust this to be accurate yet.

Overview
Bareos is an open-source backup system. Bareos is a fork of Bacula.

Bareos has a steep learning curve. Bareos is primarily controlled through configuration files and a text console called bconsole.

There are multiple independant components of Bareos:


 * Director - Tells other components what to do, handles scheduling.


 * File daemon - Accesses files on the machine to be backed up


 * Storage daemon - Stores files
 * Webui - Optional, provides a web-based GUI overview of the backup. Some very frustrating to use control functionality is provided through a web-based version of bconsole.

Configuration is through structured text config files.

Installation of the bareos package DOES NOT implicitly install all the bareos packages.

ex. bareos-tape must be installed explicitly by the user.

Installation
TODO Centos7: $sudo yum update -y # Bring system up to date $sudo yum install bareos bareos-tape bareos-consoleapps

Configuration
Config files are located in /etc/bareos/*.d/*/*.conf

Each component/daemon has its own exclusive config files.

Namespace issues are not resolved. I do not know this yet.

Director

 * Schedule - Defines some time that things might be done
 * Pool - ?
 * Storage - Defines what part of the storage daemon is talked to.
 * Fileset - Defines what files get included/excluded.
 * JobDef - Defines a base definition for jobs to use.
 * Job - Inherits and overrides JobDef values. Is what gets run.

Storage Daemon

 * Device - TODO

File Daemon

 * TODO

Pitfalls / Traps

 * Bareos will not implicitly create directories.
 * Bareos requires permission be given to it to interact with its config files and storage locations.
 * Installing Bareos requires the user to EXPLICITLY select certain 'optional' packages for certain expected functionality such as tape or extra console commands.
 * Storage pools?
 * Database?
 * LOGGING! Bareos logging is poor. You must specify an extra flag to the daemon to make it give log messages.
 * Bareos is picky about quotation in config files. A singlequote character (') gets interpreted as a character rather than quoting / encapsulation. Be careful to only use doublequote characters (") for quoting / encapsulation inside the config files.
 * Related to quoting: Be careful not to set up a configuration where bareos is allocated to be able to write more than a disk is able to store, as this will fill up the disk and make bareos fail. (Especially important if your OS has a small seperate partition for it's own files. e.g. /var/lib/bareos/\')