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# Bacula Frequently Asked Questions

See the bugs section of this document for a list of known bugs and solutions.

What is Bacula?

  Bacula is a network backup and restore program.
Does Bacula support Windows?

  Yes, Bacula compiles and runs on Windows machines (Win98, WinMe, WinXP, WinNT, and Win2000). We provide a binary version of the Client (bacula-fd), but have not tested the Director nor the Storage daemon. Note, Win95 is no longer supported because it doesn't have the GetFileAttributesExA API call.

What language is Bacula written in?

  It is written mostly in C. Certain C++ features are used such as defining variables just before they are used. Thus Bacula is completely compiled using the C++ compiler. There are several modules, including the Win32 interface that are written in C++, and over time, we are slowly converting to using a small subset of C++.

On what machines does Bacula run?

  Bacula builds and executes on RedHat Linux (versions 7.1, 7.2, and 7.3), FreeBSD, Solaris, and Win32. On Win32 systems (Win98/Me/XP/NT/2000), only the client program (File daemon) has been tested.

  Bacula has been my only backup tool for over three years backing up 5 machines nightly (3 Linux boxes running RedHat, a Win98 machine, and a WinNT machine).

Is Bacula stable?

  Yes, it is remarkably stable, but remember, there are still a lot of unimplemented or partially implemented features. With a program of this size (64,000+ lines of C code not including the SQL programs) there are bound to be bugs. The current test environment (a twisted pair local network and a HP DLT backup tape) is rather idea, so additional testing on other sites is necessary. The File daemon has never crashed -- running months at a time with no intervention. The Storage daemon is remarkably stable with most of the problems arising during labeling or switching tapes. Storage daemon crashes are rare. The Director, given the multitude of functions it fulfills is also relatively stable. In a production environment, it rarely if ever crashes. Of the three daemons, the Director is the most prone to having problems. It frequently runs several months with no problems.

  There are a number of reasons for this stability. 1. The program was largely written by one person to date (Kern). 2. The program constantly is checking the chain of allocated memory buffers to ensure that no overruns have occurred. 3. All memory leaks (orphaned buffers) are reported each time the program terminates. 4. Any signal (segmentation fault, ...) generates a traceback that is emailed to the developer. This permits quick resolution of bugs even if they only show up rarely in a production system.

I'm Getting Authorization Errors. What is Going On?

  For security reasons, Bacula requires that both the File daemon and the Storage daemon know the name of the Director as well as his password. As a consequence, if you change the Director's name or password, you must make the corresponding change in the Storage daemon and in the File daemon configuration files.

  During the authorization process, the Storage daemon and File daemon also require that the Director authenticate himself, so both ends require the other to have the correct name and password.

My Catalog is Full of Test Runs, How Can I Start Over?

  If you are using MySQL do the following:

         cd <bacula-source>/src/cats
         ./drop_mysql_tables
         ./make_mysql_tables

  If you are using SQLite, do the following:

         Delete bacula.db from your working directory.
         cd <bacula-source>/src/cats
         ./drop_sqlite_tables
         ./make_sqlite_tables

  Then write an EOF on each tape you used with Bacula

I Run a Restore Job and Bacula Hangs. What do I do?

  On Bacula version 1.25 and prior, it expects you to have the correct tape mounted prior to a restore. On Bacula version 1.26 and higher, it will ask you for the tape, and if the wrong one it mounted, it will inform you.

  If you have previously done an unmount command, all Storage daemon sessions (jobs) will be completely blocked from using the drive unmounted, so be sure to do a mount after your unmount. If in doubt, do a second mount, it won't cause any harm.

I Cannot Get My Windows Client to Start Automatically?

  You are probably having one of two problems: either the Client is dying due to an incorrect configuration file, or you didn't do the Installation commands necessary to install it as a Windows Service.

  For the first problem, see the next FAQ question. For the second problem, please review the Windows Installation instructions in this manual.

My Windows Client Immediately Dies When I Start It

  The most common problem is either that the configuration file is not where it expects it to be, or that there is an error in the configuration file. You must have the configuration file in c:\bacula\bin\bacula-fd.conf.

  To see what is going on when the File daemon starts on Windows, do the following:

          Start a DOS shell Window.
          cd c:\bacula\bin
          bacula-fd -t >out
          type out

  Calling bacula-fd with redirection (>) will write the diagnostic output to the file out which you can then list. The -t option tells Bacula to read the configuration file and then exit.

When I Start the Console, the Error Messages Fly By. How can I see them?

  Either use a shell window with a scroll bar, or use the gnome-console. In any case, you probably should be logging all output to a file, and then you can simply view the file using an editor or the less program. To log all output, I have the following in my Director's Message resource definition:

          append = "/home/kern/bacula/bin/log" = all, !skipped

  Obviously you will want to change the filename to be appropriate for your system.

I didn't realize that the backups were not working on my Windows Client. What should I do?

  You should be sending yourself an email message for each job. This will avoid the possibility of not knowing about a failed backup. To do so put something like:

        Mail = yourname@yourdomain = all, !skipped

  in your Director's message resource. You should then receive one email for each Job that ran. When you are comfortable with what is going on (it took me 9 months), you might change that to:

         MailOnError = yourname@yourdomain = all, !skipped

  then you only get email messages when a Job errors as is the case for your Windows machine.

  You should also be logging the Director's messages, please see the previous FAQ for how to do so.

All my Jobs are scheduled for the same time. Will this cause problems?

  No, not at all. Bacula will schedule all the Jobs at the same time, but will run them one after another unless you have increased the number of simultaneous jobs in the configuration files for the Director, the File daemon, and the Storage daemon. The appropriate configuration record is Maximum Concurrent Jobs = nn. At the current time, we recommend that you leave this set to 1 for the Director.

Can Bacula Backup My System To Files instead of Tape?

  Yes, in principle, Bacula can backup to any storage medium as long as you have correctly defined that medium in the Storage daemon's Device resource. For an example of how to backup to files, please see the Pruning Example in the Recycling chapter of this manual.

Can Bacula Backup and Restore Files Greater than 2 Giga Bytes in Size?

  If your operating system permits it, and you are running Bacula version 1.26 or later, the answer is yes. Unfortunately, large files are not supported by cygwin which Bacula uses for the Windows version client. Just the same, when Bacula saves and restores to tape media, it does not use seek() calls, thus there should be no problems with file sizes.

I Started A Job then Decided I Really Did Not Want to Run It. Is there a better way than ./bacula stop to stop it?

  Yes, you normally should use the Console command cancel to cancel a Job that is either scheduled or running. If the Job is scheduled, it will be marked for cancellation and will be canceled when it is scheduled to start. If it is running, it will normally terminate after a few minutes. If the Job is waiting on a tape mount, you will need to do a mount command before it will be canceled.

Why have You Trademarked the Name Bacula®?

  We have trademarked the name Bacula to ensure that all media written by any program named Bacula will always be compatible. Anyone may use the name Bacula, even in a derivative product as long as it remains totally compatible in all respects with the program defined here.

Why is Your Online Document for Version 1.27 of Bacula when the Currently Release Version is 1.26?

  As Bacula is being developed, the document is also being enhanced, more often than not it has clarifications of existing features that can be very useful to our users, so we publish the very latest document. Fortunately it is rare that there are confusions with new features.

  If you want to read a document that pertains only to a specific version, please use the one distributed in the source code.

How Can You Be Sure that Bacula Really Saves and Restores All Files?

  It is really quite simple, but took me awhile to figure out how to "prove" it. First make a Bacula Rescue disk, see the Disaster Recovery Using Bacula of this manual. Second, you run a full backup of all your files on all partitions. Third, you run an Verify InitCatalog Job on the same FileSet, which effectively makes a record of all the files on your system. Fourth, you run a Verify Catalog job and assure yourself that nothing has changed (well, between an InitCatalog and Catalog one doesn't expect anything). Then do the unthinkable, write zeros on your MBR (master boot record) wiping out your hard disk. Now, restore your whole system using your Bacula Rescue disk and the Full backup you made, and finally re-run the Verify Catalog job. You will see that with the exception of the directory modification and access dates and the files changed during the boot, your system is identical to what it was before you wiped your hard disk.

I did a Full backup last week, but now in running an Incremental, Bacula says it did not file a FULL backup time, so it did a FULL backup. Why?

  Before doing an Incremental or a Differential backup, Bacula checks to see if there was a prior Full backup of the same Job that terminated successfully. If so, it uses the date that full backup started as the time for comparing if files have changed. If Bacula does not find a successfull full backup, it proceeds to do one. Perhaps you canceled the full backup, or it terminated in error. In such cases, the full backup will not be successful. You can check by entering list jobs and look to see if there is a prior Job with the same Name that has Level F and JobStatus T (normal termination).

How Can You Claim to Handle Unlimited Path and Filename Lengths when All Other Programs Have Fixed Limits?

  Most of those other programs have been around for a long time, in fact since the beginning of Unix, which means that they were designed for rather small fixed length path and filename lengths. Over the years, these restrictions have been relaxed allowing longer names. Bacula on the other hand was designed in 2000, and so from the start, Path and Filenames have been keep in buffers that start at 256 bytes in length but can grow as needed to handle any length. Most of the work is carried out by lower level routines making the coding rather easy.

What Is the Really Unique Feature of Bacula?

  Well, it is hard to come up with unique features when backup programs for Unix machines have been around since the 1960s. That said, I believe that Bacula is the first and only program to use a standard SQL interface to its catalog database. Although this adds a bit of complexity and overhead, it provides an amazingly rich set of features that are easy to program and enhance. The current code has barely scratched the surface in this regard (version 1.29).

  The second unique feature, which is currently (1.29) unimplemented, and thus can be called vaporware :-), is Base level saves. When implemented, this will enormously reduce tape usage.

Since Bacula is Multithreaded, Why Do You Recommend Not Running Multiple Simultaneous Jobs?

  Bacula can run multiple simultaneous jobs, but being very conservative, I do not recommend doing so at the current time for two reasons: 1. I'm not sure that two jobs accessing the same Volume won't have catalog conflicts. 2. Doing a restore from a Volume with records from two jobs intermingled is complicated.

  I expect to have definitive solutions to both of those problems in a later version. In the mean time, I recommend running one Job at a time. If you want to experiment with this as several large shops are doing, ensure that each job is writing to a different Volume (i.e. has a different Storage resource). This will avoid the two problems mentioned above. Just the same, there may be other race conditions in the Director that cause problems. Be forewarned.

If I Do Run Multiple Simultaneous Jobs, How Can I Force One Particular Job to Run After Another Job?

  This is possible by using the RunBeforeJob and RunAfterJob statements. For example, assume that you want job B to start only after job A has completely finished. First schedule Job A to start at least one minute before job B. Then within Job A, use the RunBeforeJob to create a "lock" file and the RunAfterJob to delete that file, and within Job B, make the RunBeforeJob statement call a small shell script that waits until the "lock" file does not exist. For example: Job A:

          RunBeforeJob = "touch /tmp/Bacula-run.lock"
          RunAfterJob = "rm -f /tmp/Bacula-run.lock"

  and in Job B use:

          RunBeforeJob = "while true ; do if [ -f /tmp/Bacula-run.lock ] ;
                          then sleep 5; else break; fi; done"

  where the above RunBeforeJob is all entered on a single line. With the above statements, Job B will start running just after Job A runs, but it will be blocked until a few seconds (0 - 5) after Job A terminates.

I Am Not Getting Email Notification, What Can I Do?

  The most common problem is that you have not specified a fully qualified email address and your smtp server is rejecting the mail. The next most common problem is that your smtp server doesn't like the syntax on the From part of the message. For more details on this and other problems, please see the Getting Email Notification to Work section of the Tips chapter of this manual. The section Getting Notified of Job Completion of the Tips chapter may also be useful. For more information on the smtp mail program, please see smtp in the Volume Utility Tools chapter of this manual.

I Change Recycling, Retention Periods, or File Sizes in my Pool Resource and they Still Don"t Work.

  The different variables associated with a Pool are defined in the Pool Resource, but are actually read by Bacula from the Catalog database. On Bacula versions prior to 1.30, after changing your Pool Resource, you must manually update the corresponding values in the Catalog by using the update pool command in the Console program. In Bacula version 1.30, Bacula does this for you automatically every time it starts.

  When Bacula creates a Media record (Volume), it uses many default values from the Pool record. If you subsequently change the Pool record, the new values will be used as a default for the next Volume that is created, but if you want the new values to apply to existing Volumes, you must manually update the Volume Catalog entry using the update volume command in the Console program.

I Have Configured Compression On, But None of My Files Are Compressed. Why?

  There are two kinds of compression. One is tape compression. This is done by the tape drive hardware, and you either enable or disable it with system tools such as mt. This compression works independently of Bacula.

  Bacula also has compression code, which is normally used only when backing up to file Volumes. There are two conditions for this "software" to be enabled.

  1. You must have the zip development libraries loaded on your system when building Bacula and Bacul must find this library, normally /usr/lib/libz.a. On RedHat systems, this library is provided by the zlib-devel rpm.

     If the library is found by Bacula during the ./configure it will be indicated on the config.out line by:

                      ZLIB support:  yes

  2. You must add the compression=gzip option on your Include statement in the Director's configuration file.

Bacula is Asking for a New Tape After 2 GB of Data but My Tape holds 33 GB. Why?

  There are several reasons why Bacula will request a new tape.
  - There is an I/O error on the tape. Bacula prints an error message and requests a new tape. Bacula does not attempt to continue writing after an I/O error.
  - Bacula encounters and end of medium on the tape. This is not always distinguishable from an I/O error.
  - You have specifically set some size limitation on the tape. For example the Maximum Volume Bytes or Maximum Volume Files in the Director's Pool resource, or Maximum Volume Size in the Storage daemon's Device resource.

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Bacula 1.30 User's Guide The Network Backup Solution | Copyright © 2000-2003 Kern Sibbald and John Walker