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/\')