My Projects: Backula backup system

This is third post in the "My Projects" series. This time, like my previous post, it is also dedicated to the World Backup Day. Two posts in a day - why not?

Although the project was about the same, there were few significant differences. 1st – 5 years difference (2009), and 2nd – mainly Linux environment.


It was a middle-size company. In a central office they had all things IT departments must have, including backup system (TSM). But I was hired in a remote division in another country, where was no System Administrator before me. There were many things to do, but today we are talking about backups.

What we had:

Three Linux servers, one external storage, limited budget.

Well, in situation with a single storage I have no possibility to protect data from a failure of that particular storage. But I split the discs in storage in two different arrays, and dedicate one of them for backups only.

This time I wanted something Enterprise-level, reliable and scalable. At that time Bacula fitted all my needs. The only problem was to get used to it. When I have opened User's manual and found out that there are 764 pages.... I was encouraged! Why? My previous job was quite boring so I was "hungry" for challenges like that. In a few days I was ready to propose a solution and install it in production.

Solution:

Quite simple, as reliable things should be

• Bacula as a backup system
• Standard schedule:
• Daily incremental backups
• Weekly differential backups
• Monthly full backups
• Workstation were also added if user desire

 Result:

Backup system is not intended to have configuration changes often. Configured once, it requires just to watch on daily notifications and make some periodical data restore.
After a new server added it was enough to create a single file with a list of directories to exclude from backup (/tmp, /media, /sys, etc. exluded by default).

Have a nice World Backup Day!