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

<h1>Getting Started with Bacula</h1>

If you are like me, you want to get <b>Bacula</b> 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.

<h2><a name="SupportedOSes">Supported Operating Systems</a></h2>
<ul type="disc">
  <li>Linux systems (built and tested on RedHat 7.3).</li>
  <li>Solaris</li>
  <li>FreeBSD (tape driver supported in 1.30)</li>
  <li>Windows Client (File daemon) binaries</li>
  <li>OpenBSD client</li>
  <li>Irix File daemon (implemented but production testing not confirmed)</li>
  <li>Bacula is known to work on many other systems (Mandrake,
      AIX, Mac-Darwin, ...) but we do not have first hand knowledge
      of these systems.
  <li>See the <a href="porting.html">Porting</a> Chapter of this
      manual for information on porting to other systems.</li>
</ul>

<h2>System Requirements</h2>
<ul type="disc">
<li><b>Bacula</b> has been compiled and run on Linux RedHat, FreeBSD,
    and Solaris systems.</li>
<li>It requires GNU C++ version 2.96 to compile.  You can try with other
    compilers and other version, but you are on your own. (We have
    successfully compiled and briefly tested Bacula on RH8.0
    with GCC 3.2, and several users report that it works fine.
    Note, in general GNU C++ is a separate
    package (e.g. RPM) from GNU C, so you need them both loaded.
    On RedHat systems, the C++ compiler is part of the <b>gcc-c++</b>
    rpm package. </li>
<li>There are certain third party packages that <b>Bacula</b> needs. Except
    for MySQL, they can all be found in the <b>depkgs</b> and
    <b>depkgs1</b> releases.</li>
<li>If you want to build the Win32 binaries, you will need the
    full Cygwin 1.3.20 release. Although all components build (console
    has some warnings), only the File daemon has been tested.
    Please note that if you attempt to build Bacula on any other
    version of Cygwin, particularly older versions or with GCC 3.2, you will
    be on your own.</li>
<li><b>Bacula</b> requires a good implementation of pthreads to work.</li>
<li>The source code has been written with portability in mind and is
    mostly POSIX compatible. Thus porting to any POSIX compatible operating
    system should be relatively easy.</li>
<li>The GNOME Console program is developed and tested under GNOME 1.4. It
    also compiles under GNOME 2.0 (Bacula version 1.30 on a RH 8.0 system),
    and appears to work fine, but more production testing is needed.
</ul>

<h2><a name="SupportedDrives">Supported Tape Drives</a></h2>
It is very difficult to supply a list of supported tape drives,
or drives that are known to work with Bacula because of limited
feedback (so if you use Bacula on a different drive, please let
us know). The following drives are known to work with Bacula:
<ul type="disc">
  <li>Sony DDS 2,3,4 drives</li>
  <li>HP DLT drives</li>
  <li>Compaq DDS 2,3,4 drives (probably OEMed)</li>
  <li>Exabyte drives (except for those 10 years old or older)</li>
  <li>HP Colorado T4000S (Travan-4) drives with <b>Backward Space Record = No</b></li>
  <li>Ecrix VXA drives.</li>
  <li>Tandberg MLR3 on Linux</li>
  <li>Tandbert SLR6 on FreeBSD</li>
</ul>
Please check the <a href="progs.html#btape">btape section</a> of this
manual for procedures that you can use to verify if your tape drive
will work with Bacula. Also there is a list of 
<a href="autochangers.html#Models">supported autochangers</a>
models in the <a href="autochangers.html">autochangers chapter</a>
of this document, where you will find other tape drives that
work with Bacula.

<h2><a name="UnSupportedDrives">Unsupported Tape Drives</a></h2>
The following drives are known either to not work or to
have serious problems.
<ul type="disc">
  <li>All OnStream IDE-SCSI drives do not work</li>
  <li>OnStream SCSI drives are unlikely to work</li>
</ul>
QIC tapes are known to have a number of particularities (fixed
block size, and one EOF rather than two to terminate the tape). As     
a consequence, you will need to take a lot of care in configuring them
to make them work correctly with Bacula.


<h2>Up Front Decisions</h2>
<ul type="disc">
<li>Before building <b>Bacula</b> you need to decide if you
    want to use SQLite or MySQL.  
    Unless you are already familiar with MySQL, we suggest that you
    use the SQLite database as it is the simplest.
    If you need security or have a large operation, you should consider the
    MySQL database because it provides all the <b>Bacula</b> features and is the
    best tested. MySQL is also much easier to upgrade than SQLite
    when new versions of <b>Bacula</b> require a database update. </li>
<li>If you wish to use SQLite as the Bacula catalog,
    please see <a href="sqlite.html">Installing and Configuring SQLite</a>
    chapter of this manual.</li>
<li>If you wish to use MySQL as the Bacula catalog, please see the 
    <a href="mysql.html">Installing and Configuring MySQL</a>
    chapter of this manual.</li>
<li>At this point, you should have Bacula built and installed. If not,
    please follow the instructions in the <a href="install.html">Bacula Installation Chapter</a>
    of this manual.</li>
</ul>

<h2>Installing Bacula</h2>
Before setting up your configuration files, you will want to install
<b>Bacula</b> in its final location. Simply enter:
<pre>
make install
</pre>
If you have previously installed <b>Bacula</b>, the old binaries
will be overwritten, but the old configuration files will remain
unchanged, and the &quot;new&quot; configuration files will be
appended with a <b>.new</b>. Generally if you have previously
installed and run <b>Bacula</b> you will want to discard or 
ignore the configuration files with the appended <b>.new</b>.
For the details of doing the install, please see the
<a href="install.html">Installing Bacula</a> chapter of this
manual.

<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 <b>Bacula</b> 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 <b>Bacula</b> 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 <b>Bacula</b>
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, <b>Bacula</b> 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 <b>Bacula</b> will read or write a Volume, the physical Volume
must have a <b>Bacula</b> software label so that
<b>Bacula</b> 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 vise versa, and <b>Bacula</b>
will tell you want 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 <b>Bacula</b>,
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 <b>Bacula</b> 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 <b>Bacula</b>
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 <b>Bacula</b>
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 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>.
Normally, for first time users, no change
is needed to this file.  Reasonable defaults are set.

<h3><a href="filedconf.html">Configuring the File daemon</a></h3>
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 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 <b>Client</b> 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'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>.

<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
./console -t -c console.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.

<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.

<h2>Running Bacula</h2>
Please see the <a href="running.html">Running Bacula Chapter</a>
of this manual for detailed instructions on how to run <b>Bacula</b>

<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 <b>Bacula</b> 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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