
#include "bacula_template.inc" title="Getting Started" num=3

<h1>Getting Started with Bacula</h1>

If you are like me, you want to get Bacula running
immediately to get a feel for it, then later you want
to go back and read about all the details.  This
chapter attempts to accomplish just that: get you
going quickly without all the details. If you want to
skip the section on Pools, Volumes and Labels, you can
always come back to it, but please read to the end
of this chapter, and in particular follow the instructions
for testing your tape drive.

<p>
We assume that you have managed to build and install
Bacula, if not, you might want to first look at the
<a href="supported.html#SysReqs">System Requirements</a>
then at the <a href="install.html">Compiling and Installing
Bacula</a> chapter of this manual.

<a name="PoolsVolsLabels"></a>
<h2>Understanding Pools, Volumes and Labels</h2>
If you have been using a program such as <b>tar</b> to backup your
system, Pools, Volumes, and labeling may be a bit confusing at first.
A Volume is a single physical tape (or possibly a single file) on
which Bacula will write your backup data.
Pools group together Volumes so that a backup is not restricted
to the length of a single Volume (tape).  Consequently, rather
than explicitly naming Volumes in your Job, you specify a
Pool, and Bacula will select the next appendable
Volume from the Pool and request you to mount it.
<p>                        
Although the basic Pool options are specified in the Director's Pool
resource, the <b>real</b> Pool is maintained in the Bacula
Catalog.  It contains information taken from the Pool resource
(bacula-dir.conf) as well as information on all the Volumes that have
been added to the Pool.  Adding Volumes to a Pool is usually done
manually with the Console program using the <b>label</b> command.
<p>
For each Volume, Bacula maintains a fair amount of catalog
information such as the first write date/time, the
last write date/time, the number of files on the Volume, the number of
bytes on the Volume, the number of Mounts, etc.

<p>Before Bacula will read or write a Volume, the physical Volume
must have a Bacula software label so that
Bacula can be sure the correct Volume is mounted. This
is usually done using the <b>label</b> command in the Console
program.

<p>
The steps for creating a Pool, adding Volumes to it, and writing
software labels to the Volumes, may seem tedious at first, but in fact,
they are quite simple to do, and they allow you to use multiple
Volumes (rather than being limited to the size of a single tape).
Pools also give you significant flexibility in your backup
process. For example, you can
have a &quot;Daily&quot; Pool of Volumes for Incremental backups
and a &quot;Weekly&quot; Pool of Volumes for Full backups.
By specifying the appropriate Pool in the daily and weekly 
backup Jobs, you thereby insure that no daily Job ever writes
to a Volume in the Weekly Pool and vice versa, and Bacula
will tell you what tape is needed and when.
<p>
For more on Pools, see the <a href="dirdconf.html#PoolResource">Pool Resource</a>
section of the Director Configuration chapter, or simply read on, and
we will come back to this subject later.

<h2><a name="config"></a>Setting Up Bacula Configuration Files</h2>
After running the appropriate <b>./configure</b> command and doing
a <b>make</b>, and a <b>make install</b>, if this is the
first time you are running Bacula,
you must create valid configuration files for
the Director, the File daemon, the Storage daemon, and the Console
programs. If you have followed our recommendations,
default configuration files as well as the daemon
binaries will be located in your installation directory. In
any case, the binaries are found in the directory you specified
on the <b>--sbindir</b> option to the <b>./configure</b> command,
and the configuration files are found in the directory you
specified on the <b>--sysconfdir</b> option.
<p>
When initially setting up Bacula you will need to invest
a bit of time in modifying the default configuration files to suit
your environment. This may entail starting and stopping Bacula
a number of times until you get everything right. Please do not 
despair. Once you have created your configuration files, you will
rarely need to change them nor will you stop and start Bacula
very often. Most of the work will simply be in changing the tape when
it is full.

<h3><a href="consoleconf.html">Configuring the Console Program</a></h3>
The Console program is used by the administrator to interact with
the Director and to manually start/stop Jobs or to obtain Job status
information.
<p>
The Console configuration file is found in the directory specified on
the <b>--sysconfdir</b> option that you specified on the
<b>./configure</b> command and by default is named <b>console.conf</b>.<p>
If you choose to build the GNOME console with the <b>--enable-gnome</b>
option, you also find a default configuration file for it, named <b>gnome-console.conf</b>.<p>
The same applies to the wxWidgets console, which is build with the
<b>--enable-wx-console</b> option, and the name of the default configuration
file is, in this case, <b>wx-console.conf</b>.<p>
Normally, for first time users, no change
is needed to these files.  Reasonable defaults are set.

<h3><a href="monitorconf.html">Configuring the Monitor Program</a></h3>
The Monitor program is typically an icon in the system tray. 
However, once the icon is expanded into a full window, 
the administrator or user can obtain status information about the Director or the     
backup status on the local workstation or any other Bacula
daemon that is configured.  
<p>
<img src="Bacula-tray-monitor.png" border="0" alt="tray-monitor image">
<p>
The image shows a tray-monitor configured for three daemons. By clicking
on the radio buttons in the upper left corner of the image, you can
see the status for each of the daemons. The image shows the status
for the Storage daemon (MainSD) that is currently selected. 
<p>
The Monitor configuration file is found in the directory specified on
the <b>--sysconfdir</b> option that you specified on the
<b>./configure</b> command and by default is named <b>tray-monitor.conf</b>.
Normally, for first time users, you just need to change the permission of this
file to allow non-root users to run the Monitor, as this application must run 
as the same user as the graphical environment (don't forget allow non-root users
to execute <b>bacula-tray-monitor</b>).
This is not a security problem as long as you use the default settings.

<h3><a href="filedconf.html">Configuring the File daemon</a></h3>
The File daemon is a program that runs on each (Client) machine. At
the request of the Director, finds the files to be backed up and
sends them (their data) to the Storage daemon.
<p>
The File daemon configuration file is found in the directory specified on
the <b>--sysconfdir</b> option that you specified on the
<b>./configure</b> command.  By default, the File daemon's configuration
file is named <b>bacula-fd.conf</b>.
Normally, for first time users, no change
is needed to this file.  Reasonable defaults are set. However, if you
are going to back up more than one machine, you will need to install
the File daemon with a unique configuration file on each machine to
be backed up. The information about each File daemon must appear in
the Director's configuration file.

<h3><a href="dirdconf.html">Configuring the Director</a></h3>
The Director is the central control program for all the other
daemons. It schedules and monitors all jobs to be backed up.
<p>
The Director configuration file is found in the directory specified on the
<b>--sysconfdir</b> option that you specified on the <b>./configure</b>
command. Normally the Director's configuration file is named
<b>bacula-dir.conf</b>.

<p></p> In general, the only change you must make is modify
the FileSet resource so that the <b>Include</b> configuration directive
contains at least one line with a valid name of a directory (or file) to
be saved.  

<p></p>If you do not have a DLT tape drive, you will probably
want to edit the Storage resource to contain names that are more
representative of your actual storage device.  You can always use the
existing names as you are free to arbitrarily assign them, but they must
agree with the corresponding names in the Storage daemon's configuration
file.  

<p></p> You may also want to change the email address for
notification from the default <b>root</b> to your email address.

<p>Finally, if you have multiple systems to be backed up, you will
need a separate File daemon or Client specification for each
system, specifying its name, address, and password.  We have found
that giving your daemons the same name as your system but post fixed
with <b>-fd</b> helps a lot in debugging. That is, if your system
name is <b>foobaz</b>, you would give the File daemon the name
<b>foobaz-fd</b>. For the Director, you might use <b>foobaz-dir</b>,
and for the storage daemon, you might use <b>foobaz-sd</b>.

<h3><a href="storedconf.html">Configuring the Storage daemon</a></h3>
The Storage daemon is responsible, at the Director's request, for accepting
data from a File daemon and placing it on Storage media, or in the case
of a restore request, to find the data and send it to the File    
daemon.
<p>
The Storage daemon's configuration file is found in the directory specified on the
<b>--sysconfdir</b> option that you specified on the <b>./configure</b>
command.  By default, the Storage daemon's file is named
<b>bacula-sd.conf</b>. Edit this file to contain the correct
Archive device names for any tape devices that you have.  If the
configuration process properly detected your system, they will already
be correctly set.  These Storage resource name and Media Type must be
the same as the corresponding ones in the Director's configuration file
<b>bacula-dir.conf</b>.  If you want to backup to a file instead of a tape,
the Archive device must point to a directory in which the Volumes will 
be created as files when you label the Volume.

<a name="ConfigTesting"></a>
<h2>Testing your Configuration Files</h2>
You can test if your configuration file is syntactically
correct by running the appropriate daemon with the <b>-t</b> option.
The daemon will process the configuration file and print any error
messages then terminate. For example, assuming you have installed
your binaries and configuration files in the same directory.
<pre>
cd &lt;installation-directory&gt;
./bacula-dir -t -c bacula-dir.conf
./bacula-fd -t -c bacula-fd.conf
./bacula-sd -t -c bacula-sd.conf
./bconsole -t -c bconsole.conf
./gnome-console -t -c gnome-console.conf
./wx-console -t -c wx-console.conf
su &lt;normal user&gt; -c "./bacula-tray-monitor -t -c tray-monitor.conf"
</pre>
will test the configuration files of each of the main programs.
If the configuration file is OK, the program will terminate
without printing anything. Please note that, depending on the configure
options you choose, some, or even all, of the three last commands
will not be available on your system.
If you have installed the binaries in traditional Unix locations 
rather than a single file, you will need to modify the above
commands appropriately (no ./ in front of the command name, and a
path in front of the conf file name).

<a name="TapeTesting"></a>
<h2>Testing Bacula Compatibility with Your Tape Drive</h2>
Before spending a lot of time on Bacula only to find that
it doesn't work with your tape drive, please read the
<a href="tapetesting.html">btape -- Testing Your Tape Drive</a>
chapter of this manual.
If you have a modern standard SCSI tape drive on a Linux
or Solaris, most likely it
will work, but better test than be sorry. For FreeBSD (and probably
other xBSD flavors), reading the above mentioned tape testing
chapter is a must.  Also, for FreeBSD, please see           
<a href="http://www.freebsddiary.org/bacula.php">The FreeBSD
Diary</a> for a detailed description on how to make Bacula 
work on your system. In addition, users of FreeBSD prior to 4.9-STABLE
dated Mon Dec 29 15:18:01 2003 UTC who plan to use tape devices,
please see the file <b>platforms/freebsd/pthreads-fix.txt</b>
in the main Bacula directory concerning important information
concerning compatibility of Bacula and your system.

<a name="notls"></a>
<h2>Get Rid of the /lib/tls Directory</h2>
The new pthreads library <b>/lib/tls</b> installed
by default on recent Red Hat systems running kernel 2.4.x is 
defective. You must remove it or rename it then reboot your
system before running Bacula otherwise after a week or so
of running, Bacula will either block for long periods or
deadlock entirely. The feedback that we have concerning 2.6
kernels is the same. However, on 2.6 systems, you may
want to use the loader environment variable override
rather than removing /lib/tls. Please see
<a href="supported.html#SupportedOSes">
Supported Operating Systems</a> for more information
on this problem.

<a name="Running"></a>
<h2>Running Bacula</h2>
Probably the most important part of running Bacula is being
able to restore files. If you haven't tried recovering files
at least once, when you actually have to do it, you will
be under a lot more pressure, and prone to make errors, than
if you had already tried it once.
<p>
To get a good idea how to use Bacula in a short time,
we <b>strongly</b> recommend that you follow the 
example in the
<a href="running.html">Running Bacula Chapter</a>
of this manual where you will get detailed instructions on 
how to run Bacula.

<h2>Log Rotation</h2>
If you use the default <b>bacula-dir.conf</b> or some variation   
of it, you will note that it logs all the Bacula output to a
file. To avoid that this file grows without limit, we recommend
that you copy the file <b>logrotate</b> from the <b>scripts/logrotate</b>
to <b>/etc/logrotate.d/bacula</b>. This will cause the 
log file to be rotated once a month and kept for a maximum
of 5 months.  You may want to edit this file to change the default
log rotation preferences.

<h2>Disaster Recovery</h2>
If you intend to use Bacula as a disaster recovery tool
rather than simply a program to restore lost or damaged files,
you will want to read the <a href="rescue.html">Disaster Recovery
Using Bacula Chapter</a> of this manual.
<p>
In any case, you are strongly urged to carefully test restoring 
some files that you have saved rather than wait until disaster
strikes. This way, you will be prepared.

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