Projects:
Bacula Projects Roadmap
- Status updated 26 April 2009
+ Status updated 8 August 2010
Summary:
-Item 1: Allow FD to initiate a backup
-Item 2: Ability to restart failed jobs
-Item 3: Port bat to Win32
-Item 4: Convert Bacula existing tray monitor on Windows to a stand alone program
-Item 5: Ability to import/export Bacula database entities
-Item 6: Ability to defer Batch Insert to a later time
-Item 7: List InChanger flag when doing restore.
-Item 8: Deletion of disk Volumes when pruned
-Item 9: Implement Base jobs
-Item 10: Scheduling syntax that permits more flexibility and options
-Item 11: Reduction of communications bandwidth for a backup
-Item 12: Bacula Dir, FD and SD to support proxies
-Item 13: Message mailing based on backup types
-Item 14: Ability to reconnect a disconnected comm line
-Item 15: Include timestamp of job launch in "stat clients" output
-Item 16: Add an override in Schedule for Pools based on backup types
-Item 17: Automatic promotion of backup levels based on backup size
-Item 18: Allow inclusion/exclusion of files in a fileset by creation/mod times
-Item 19: Archival (removal) of User Files to Tape
-Item 20: Include all conf files in specified directory
-Item 21: Implement an interface between Bacula and Amazon's S3.
-Item 22: Enable/disable compression depending on storage device (disk/tape)
-Item 23: Backup and Restore of Windows Encrypted Files using Win raw encryption
-Item 24: Data encryption on storage daemon
-Item 25: "Maximum Concurrent Jobs" for drives when used with changer device
-Item 26: Add MaxVolumeSize/MaxVolumeBytes statement to Storage resource
-Item 27: Start spooling even when waiting on tape
-Item 28: Enable persistent naming/number of SQL queries
-Item 29: Implementation of running Job speed limit.
-Item 30: Restore from volumes on multiple storage daemons
-Item 31: 'restore' menu: enter a JobId, automatically select dependents
-Item 32: Possibilty to schedule Jobs on last Friday of the month
+* => item complete
+
+Item 1: Ability to restart failed jobs
+Item 2: SD redesign
+Item* 3: NDMP backup/restore
+Item 4: SAP backup/restore
+Item 5: Oracle backup/restore
+Item 6: Zimbra and Zarafa backup/restore
+Item* 7: Include timestamp of job launch in "stat clients" output
+Item 8: Include all conf files in specified directory
+Item 9: Reduction of communications bandwidth for a backup
+Item 10: Concurrent spooling and despooling within a single job.
+Item 11: Start spooling even when waiting on tape
+Item*12: Add ability to Verify any specified Job.
+Item 13: Data encryption on storage daemon
+Item 14: Possibilty to schedule Jobs on last Friday of the month
+Item 15: Scheduling syntax that permits more flexibility and options
+Item 16: Ability to defer Batch Insert to a later time
+Item 17: Add MaxVolumeSize/MaxVolumeBytes to Storage resource
+Item 18: Message mailing based on backup types
+Item 19: Handle Windows Encrypted Files using Win raw encryption
+Item 20: Job migration between different SDs
+Item 19. Allow FD to initiate a backup
+Item 21: Implement Storage daemon compression
+Item 22: Ability to import/export Bacula database entities
+Item*23: Implementation of running Job speed limit.
+Item 24: Add an override in Schedule for Pools based on backup types
+Item 25: Automatic promotion of backup levels based on backup size
+Item 26: Allow FileSet inclusion/exclusion by creation/mod times
+Item 27: Archival (removal) of User Files to Tape
+Item 28: Ability to reconnect a disconnected comm line
+Item 29: Multiple threads in file daemon for the same job
+Item 30: Automatic disabling of devices
+Item 31: Enable persistent naming/number of SQL queries
+Item 32: Bacula Dir, FD and SD to support proxies
Item 33: Add Minumum Spool Size directive
-Item 34: Cause daemons to use a specific IP address to source communications
-Item 35: Add ability to Verify any specified Job.
-Item 36: Automatic disabling of devices
-Item 37: An option to operate on all pools with update vol parameters
-Item 38: Implement Storage daemon compression
-Item 39: Improve Bacula's tape and drive usage and cleaning management
-Item 40: Multiple threads in file daemon for the same job
-
-
-Item 1: Allow FD to initiate a backup
-Origin: Frank Volf (frank at deze dot org)
-Date: 17 November 2005
-Status:
-
-What: Provide some means, possibly by a restricted console that
- allows a FD to initiate a backup, and that uses the connection
- established by the FD to the Director for the backup so that
- a Director that is firewalled can do the backup.
-Why: Makes backup of laptops much easier.
-
-Item 2: Ability to restart failed jobs
+Item 34: Command that releases all drives in an autochanger
+Item 35: Run bscan on a remote storage daemon from within bconsole.
+Item 36: Implement a Migration job type that will create a reverse
+Item 37: Separate "Storage" and "Device" in the bacula-dir.conf
+Item 38: Least recently used device selection for tape drives in autochanger.
+Item 39: Implement a Storage device like Amazon's S3.
+Item*40: Convert tray monitor on Windows to a stand alone program
+Item 41: Improve Bacula's tape and drive usage and cleaning management
+Item 42: Relabel disk volume after recycling
+
+Item 1: Ability to restart failed jobs
Date: 26 April 2009
Origin: Kern/Eric
Status:
Notes: Requires Accurate to restart correctly. Must completed have a minimum
volume of data or files stored on Volume before enabling.
-Item 3: Port bat to Win32
- Date: 26 April 2009
- Origin: Kern/Eric
+Item 2: SD redesign
+ Date: 8 August 2010
+ Origin: Kern
Status:
- What: Make bat run on Win32/64.
+ What: Various ideas for redesigns planned for the SD:
+ 1. One thread per drive
+ 2. Design a class structure for all objects in the SD.
+ 3. Make Device into C++ classes for each device type
+ 4. Make Device have a proxy (front end intercept class) that will permit control over locking and changing the real device pointer. It can also permit delaying opening, so that we can adapt to having another program that tells us the Archive device name.
+ 5. Allow plugins to create new on the fly devices
+ 6. Separate SD volume manager
+ 7. Volume manager tells Bacula what drive or device to use for a given volume
+
+ Why: It will simplify the SD, make it more modular, reduce locking
+ conflicts, and allow multiple buffer backups.
- Why: To have GUI on Windows
- Notes:
+Item 3: NDMP backup/restore
+ Date: 8 August 2010
+ Origin: Bacula Systems
+ Status: Enterprise only if implemented by Bacula Systems
-Item 4: Convert Bacula existing tray monitor on Windows to a stand alone program
- Date: 26 April 2009
- Origin: Kern/Eric
- Status:
+ What: Backup/restore via NDMP -- most important NetApp compatibility
- What: Separate Win32 tray monitor to be a separate program.
- Why: Vista does not allow SYSTEM services to interact with the
- desktop, so the current tray monitor does not work on Vista
- machines.
- Notes: Requires communicating with the FD via the network (simulate
- a console connection).
+Item 4: SAP backup/restore
+ Date: 8 August 2010
+ Origin: Bacula Systems
+ Status: Enterprise only if implemented by Bacula Systems
+ What: Backup/restore SAP databases (MaxDB, Oracle, possibly DB2)
-Item 5: Ability to import/export Bacula database entities
- Date: 26 April 2009
- Origin: Eric
- Status:
- What: Create a Bacula ASCII SQL database independent format that permits
- importing and exporting database catalog Job entities.
+Item 5: Oracle backup/restore
+ Date: 8 August 2010
+ Origin: Bacula Systems
+ Status: Enterprise only if implemented by Bacula Systems
- Why: For achival, database clustering, tranfer to other databases
- of any SQL engine.
+ What: Backup/restore Oracle databases
- Notes: Job selection should be by Job, time, Volume, Client, Pool and possibly
- other criteria.
+Item 6: Zimbra and Zarafa backup/restore
+ Date: 8 August 2010
+ Origin: Bacula Systems
+ Status: Enterprise only if implemented by Bacula Systems
-Item 6: Ability to defer Batch Insert to a later time
- Date: 26 April 2009
- Origin: Eric
- Status:
+ What: Backup/restore for Zimbra and Zarafa
- What: Instead of doing a Job Batch Insert at the end of the Job
- which might create resource contention with lots of Job,
- defer the insert to a later time.
- Why: Permits to focus on getting the data on the Volume and
- putting the metadata into the Catalog outside the backup
- window.
- Notes: Will use the proposed Bacula ASCII database import/export
- format (i.e. dependent on the import/export entities project).
+Item 7: Include timestamp of job launch in "stat clients" output
+ Origin: Mark Bergman <mark.bergman@uphs.upenn.edu>
+ Date: Tue Aug 22 17:13:39 EDT 2006
+ Status: Done
+ What: The "stat clients" command doesn't include any detail on when
+ the active backup jobs were launched.
-Item 7: List InChanger flag when doing restore.
- Origin: Jesper Krogh<jesper@krogh.cc>
- Date: 17 Oct 2008
- Status:
+ Why: Including the timestamp would make it much easier to decide whether
+ a job is running properly.
- What: When doing a restore the restore selection dialog ends by telling stuff
- like this:
- The job will require the following
- Volume(s) Storage(s) SD Device(s)
- ===========================================================================
- 000741L3 LTO-4 LTO3
- 000866L3 LTO-4 LTO3
- 000765L3 LTO-4 LTO3
- 000764L3 LTO-4 LTO3
- 000756L3 LTO-4 LTO3
- 001759L3 LTO-4 LTO3
- 001763L3 LTO-4 LTO3
- 001762L3 LTO-4 LTO3
- 001767L3 LTO-4 LTO3
+ Notes: It may be helpful to have the output from "stat clients" formatted
+ more like that from "stat dir" (and other commands), in a column
+ format. The per-client information that's currently shown (level,
+ client name, JobId, Volume, pool, device, Files, etc.) is good, but
+ somewhat hard to parse (both programmatically and visually),
+ particularly when there are many active clients.
- When having an autochanger, it would be really nice with an inChanger
- column so the operator knew if this restore job would stop waiting for
- operator intervention. This is done just by selecting the inChanger flag
- from the catalog and printing it in a seperate column.
+Item 8: Include all conf files in specified directory
+Date: 18 October 2008
+Origin: Database, Lda. Maputo, Mozambique
+Contact:Cameron Smith / cameron.ord@database.co.mz
+Status: New request
- Why: This would help getting large restores through minimizing the
- time spent waiting for operator to drop by and change tapes in the library.
+What: A directive something like "IncludeConf = /etc/bacula/subconfs" Every
+ time Bacula Director restarts or reloads, it will walk the given
+ directory (non-recursively) and include the contents of any files
+ therein, as though they were appended to bacula-dir.conf
- Notes: [Kern] I think it would also be good to have the Slot as well,
- or some indication that Bacula thinks the volume is in the autochanger
- because it depends on both the InChanger flag and the Slot being
- valid.
+Why: Permits simplified and safer configuration for larger installations with
+ many client PCs. Currently, through judicious use of JobDefs and
+ similar directives, it is possible to reduce the client-specific part of
+ a configuration to a minimum. The client-specific directives can be
+ prepared according to a standard template and dropped into a known
+ directory. However it is still necessary to add a line to the "master"
+ (bacula-dir.conf) referencing each new file. This exposes the master to
+ unnecessary risk of accidental mistakes and makes automation of adding
+ new client-confs, more difficult (it is easier to automate dropping a
+ file into a dir, than rewriting an existing file). Ken has previously
+ made a convincing argument for NOT including Bacula's core configuration
+ in an RDBMS, but I believe that the present request is a reasonable
+ extension to the current "flat-file-based" configuration philosophy.
+
+Notes: There is NO need for any special syntax to these files. They should
+ contain standard directives which are simply "inlined" to the parent
+ file as already happens when you explicitly reference an external file.
+Notes: (kes) this can already be done with scripting
+ From: John Jorgensen <jorgnsn@lcd.uregina.ca>
+ The bacula-dir.conf at our site contains these lines:
-Item 8: Deletion of disk Volumes when pruned
- Date: Nov 25, 2005
- Origin: Ross Boylan <RossBoylan at stanfordalumni dot org> (edited
- by Kern)
- Status:
+ #
+ # Include subfiles associated with configuration of clients.
+ # They define the bulk of the Clients, Jobs, and FileSets.
+ #
+ @|"sh -c 'for f in /etc/bacula/clientdefs/*.conf ; do echo @${f} ; done'"
- What: Provide a way for Bacula to automatically remove Volumes
- from the filesystem, or optionally to truncate them.
- Obviously, the Volume must be pruned prior removal.
+ and when we get a new client, we just put its configuration into
+ a new file called something like:
- Why: This would allow users more control over their Volumes and
- prevent disk based volumes from consuming too much space.
+ /etc/bacula/clientdefs/clientname.conf
- Notes: The following two directives might do the trick:
- Volume Data Retention = <time period>
- Remove Volume After = <time period>
- The migration project should also remove a Volume that is
- migrated. This might also work for tape Volumes.
- Notes: (Kern). The data fields to control this have been added
- to the new 3.0.0 database table structure.
+Item 9: Reduction of communications bandwidth for a backup
+ Date: 14 October 2008
+ Origin: Robin O'Leary (Equiinet)
+ Status:
+ What: Using rdiff techniques, Bacula could significantly reduce
+ the network data transfer volume to do a backup.
+ Why: Faster backup across the Internet
-Item 9: Implement Base jobs
- Date: 28 October 2005
- Origin: Kern
+ Notes: This requires retaining certain data on the client during a Full
+ backup that will speed up subsequent backups.
+
+
+Item 10: Concurrent spooling and despooling within a single job.
+Date: 17 nov 2009
+Origin: Jesper Krogh <jesper@krogh.cc>
+Status: NEW
+What: When a job has spooling enabled and the spool area size is
+ less than the total volumes size the storage daemon will:
+ 1) Spool to spool-area
+ 2) Despool to tape
+ 3) Go to 1 if more data to be backed up.
+
+ Typical disks will serve data with a speed of 100MB/s when
+ dealing with large files, network it typical capable of doing 115MB/s
+ (GbitE). Tape drives will despool with 50-90MB/s (LTO3) 70-120MB/s
+ (LTO4) depending on compression and data.
+
+ As bacula currently works it'll hold back data from the client until
+ de-spooling is done, now matter if the spool area can handle another
+ block of data. Say given a FileSet of 4TB and a spool-area of 100GB and
+ a Maximum Job Spool Size set to 50GB then above sequence could be
+ changed to allow to spool to the other 50GB while despooling the first
+ 50GB and not holding back the client while doing it. As above numbers
+ show, depending on tape-drive and disk-arrays this potentially leads to
+ a cut of the backup-time of 50% for the individual jobs.
+
+ Real-world example, backing up 112.6GB (large files) to LTO4 tapes
+ (despools with ~75MB/s, data is gzipped on the remote filesystem.
+ Maximum Job Spool Size = 8GB
+
+ Current:
+ Size: 112.6GB
+ Elapsed time (total time): 46m 15s => 2775s
+ Despooling time: 25m 41s => 1541s (55%)
+ Spooling time: 20m 34s => 1234s (45%)
+ Reported speed: 40.58MB/s
+ Spooling speed: 112.6GB/1234s => 91.25MB/s
+ Despooling speed: 112.6GB/1541s => 73.07MB/s
+
+ So disk + net can "keep up" with the LTO4 drive (in this test)
+
+ Prosed change would effectively make the backup run in the "despooling
+ time" 1541s giving a reduction to 55% of the total run time.
+
+ In the situation where the individual job cannot keep up with LTO-drive
+ spooling enables efficient multiplexing of multiple concurrent jobs onto
+ the same drive.
+
+Why: When dealing with larger volumes the general utillization of the
+ network/disk is important to maximize in order to be able to run a full
+ backup over a weekend. Current work-around is to split the FileSet in
+ smaller FileSet and Jobs but that leads to more configuration mangement
+ and is harder to review for completeness. Subsequently it makes restores
+ more complex.
+
+
+
+Item 11: Start spooling even when waiting on tape
+ Origin: Tobias Barth <tobias.barth@web-arts.com>
+ Date: 25 April 2008
Status:
-
- What: A base job is sort of like a Full save except that you
- will want the FileSet to contain only files that are
- unlikely to change in the future (i.e. a snapshot of
- most of your system after installing it). After the
- base job has been run, when you are doing a Full save,
- you specify one or more Base jobs to be used. All
- files that have been backed up in the Base job/jobs but
- not modified will then be excluded from the backup.
- During a restore, the Base jobs will be automatically
- pulled in where necessary.
-
- Why: This is something none of the competition does, as far as
- we know (except perhaps BackupPC, which is a Perl program that
- saves to disk only). It is big win for the user, it
- makes Bacula stand out as offering a unique
- optimization that immediately saves time and money.
- Basically, imagine that you have 100 nearly identical
- Windows or Linux machine containing the OS and user
- files. Now for the OS part, a Base job will be backed
- up once, and rather than making 100 copies of the OS,
- there will be only one. If one or more of the systems
- have some files updated, no problem, they will be
- automatically restored.
-
- Notes: Huge savings in tape usage even for a single machine.
- Will require more resources because the DIR must send
- FD a list of files/attribs, and the FD must search the
- list and compare it for each file to be saved.
-
-
-Item 10: Scheduling syntax that permits more flexibility and options
+
+ What: If a job can be spooled to disk before writing it to tape, it should
+ be spooled immediately. Currently, bacula waits until the correct
+ tape is inserted into the drive.
+
+ Why: It could save hours. When bacula waits on the operator who must insert
+ the correct tape (e.g. a new tape or a tape from another media
+ pool), bacula could already prepare the spooled data in the spooling
+ directory and immediately start despooling when the tape was
+ inserted by the operator.
+
+ 2nd step: Use 2 or more spooling directories. When one directory is
+ currently despooling, the next (on different disk drives) could
+ already be spooling the next data.
+
+ Notes: I am using bacula 2.2.8, which has none of those features
+ implemented.
+
+
+Item 12: Add ability to Verify any specified Job.
+Date: 17 January 2008
+Origin: portrix.net Hamburg, Germany.
+Contact: Christian Sabelmann
+Status: Can use jobid= in run command to select an old job
+
+ What:
+ The ability to tell Bacula which Job should verify instead of
+ automatically verify just the last one.
+
+ Why:
+ It is sad that such a powerfull feature like Verify Jobs
+ (VolumeToCatalog) is restricted to be used only with the last backup Job
+ of a client. Actual users who have to do daily Backups are forced to
+ also do daily Verify Jobs in order to take advantage of this useful
+ feature. This Daily Verify after Backup conduct is not always desired
+ and Verify Jobs have to be sometimes scheduled. (Not necessarily
+ scheduled in Bacula). With this feature Admins can verify Jobs once a
+ Week or less per month, selecting the Jobs they want to verify. This
+ feature is also not to difficult to implement taking in account older bug
+ reports about this feature and the selection of the Job to be verified.
+
+ Notes: For the verify Job, the user could select the Job to be verified
+ from a List of the latest Jobs of a client. It would also be possible to
+ verify a certain volume. All of these would naturaly apply only for
+ Jobs whose file information are still in the catalog.
+
+
+Item 13: Data encryption on storage daemon
+ Origin: Tobias Barth <tobias.barth at web-arts.com>
+ Date: 04 February 2009
+ Status: new
+
+ What: The storage demon should be able to do the data encryption that can
+ currently be done by the file daemon.
+
+ Why: This would have 2 advantages:
+ 1) one could encrypt the data of unencrypted tapes by doing a
+ migration job
+ 2) the storage daemon would be the only machine that would have
+ to keep the encryption keys.
+
+ Notes from Landon:
+ As an addendum to the feature request, here are some crypto
+ implementation details I wrote up regarding SD-encryption back in Jan
+ 2008:
+ http://www.mail-archive.com/bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg28860.html
+
+
+
+Item 14: Possibilty to schedule Jobs on last Friday of the month
+Origin: Carsten Menke <bootsy52 at gmx dot net>
+Date: 02 March 2008
+Status:
+
+ What: Currently if you want to run your monthly Backups on the last
+ Friday of each month this is only possible with workarounds (e.g
+ scripting) (As some months got 4 Fridays and some got 5 Fridays)
+ The same is true if you plan to run your yearly Backups on the
+ last Friday of the year. It would be nice to have the ability to
+ use the builtin scheduler for this.
+
+ Why: In many companies the last working day of the week is Friday (or
+ Saturday), so to get the most data of the month onto the monthly
+ tape, the employees are advised to insert the tape for the
+ monthly backups on the last friday of the month.
+
+ Notes: To give this a complete functionality it would be nice if the
+ "first" and "last" Keywords could be implemented in the
+ scheduler, so it is also possible to run monthy backups at the
+ first friday of the month and many things more. So if the syntax
+ would expand to this {first|last} {Month|Week|Day|Mo-Fri} of the
+ {Year|Month|Week} you would be able to run really flexible jobs.
+
+ To got a certain Job run on the last Friday of the Month for example
+ one could then write
+
+ Run = pool=Monthly last Fri of the Month at 23:50
+
+ ## Yearly Backup
+
+ Run = pool=Yearly last Fri of the Year at 23:50
+
+ ## Certain Jobs the last Week of a Month
+
+ Run = pool=LastWeek last Week of the Month at 23:50
+
+ ## Monthly Backup on the last day of the month
+
+ Run = pool=Monthly last Day of the Month at 23:50
+
+Item 15: Scheduling syntax that permits more flexibility and options
Date: 15 December 2006
Origin: Gregory Brauer (greg at wildbrain dot com) and
Florian Schnabel <florian.schnabel at docufy dot de>
Notes: Kern: I have merged the previously separate project of skipping
jobs (via Schedule syntax) into this.
-Item 11: Reduction of communications bandwidth for a backup
- Date: 14 October 2008
- Origin: Robin O'Leary (Equiinet)
- Status:
- What: Using rdiff techniques, Bacula could significantly reduce
- the network data transfer volume to do a backup.
+Item 16: Ability to defer Batch Insert to a later time
+ Date: 26 April 2009
+ Origin: Eric
+ Status:
- Why: Faster backup across the Internet
+ What: Instead of doing a Job Batch Insert at the end of the Job
+ which might create resource contention with lots of Job,
+ defer the insert to a later time.
- Notes: This requires retaining certain data on the client during a Full
- backup that will speed up subsequent backups.
-
+ Why: Permits to focus on getting the data on the Volume and
+ putting the metadata into the Catalog outside the backup
+ window.
-Item 12: Bacula Dir, FD and SD to support proxies
-Origin: Karl Grindley @ MIT Lincoln Laboratory <kgrindley at ll dot mit dot edu>
-Date: 25 March 2009
-Status: proposed
+ Notes: Will use the proposed Bacula ASCII database import/export
+ format (i.e. dependent on the import/export entities project).
-What: Support alternate methods for nailing up a TCP session such
- as SOCKS5, SOCKS4 and HTTP (CONNECT) proxies. Such a feature
- would allow tunneling of bacula traffic in and out of proxied
- networks.
-Why: Currently, bacula is architected to only function on a flat network, with
- no barriers or limitations. Due to the large configuration states of
- any network and the infinite configuration where file daemons and
- storage daemons may sit in relation to one another, bacula often is
- not usable on a network where filtered or air-gaped networks exist.
- While often solutions such as ACL modifications to firewalls or port
- redirection via SNAT or DNAT will solve the issue, often however,
- these solutions are not adequate or not allowed by hard policy.
+Item 17: Add MaxVolumeSize/MaxVolumeBytes to Storage resource
+ Origin: Bastian Friedrich <bastian.friedrich@collax.com>
+ Date: 2008-07-09
+ Status: -
- In an air-gapped network with only a highly locked down proxy services
- are provided (SOCKS4/5 and/or HTTP and/or SSH outbound) ACLs or
- iptable rules will not work.
+ What: SD has a "Maximum Volume Size" statement, which is deprecated and
+ superseded by the Pool resource statement "Maximum Volume Bytes".
+ It would be good if either statement could be used in Storage
+ resources.
-Notes: Director resource tunneling: This configuration option to utilize a
- proxy to connect to a client should be specified in the client
- resource Client resource tunneling: should be configured in the client
- resource in the director config file? Or configured on the bacula-fd
- configuration file on the fd host itself? If the ladder, this would
- allow only certain clients to use a proxy, where others do not when
- establishing the TCP connection to the storage server.
+ Why: Pools do not have to be restricted to a single storage type/device;
+ thus, it may be impossible to define Maximum Volume Bytes in the
+ Pool resource. The old MaxVolSize statement is deprecated, as it
+ is SD side only. I am using the same pool for different devices.
- Also worth noting, there are other 3rd party, light weight apps that
- could be utilized to bootstrap this. Instead of sockifing bacula
- itself, use an external program to broker proxy authentication, and
- connection to the remote host. OpenSSH does this by using the
- "ProxyCommand" syntax in the client configuration and uses stdin and
- stdout to the command. Connect.c is a very popular one.
- (http://bent.latency.net/bent/darcs/goto-san-connect-1.85/src/connect.html).
- One could also possibly use stunnel, netcat, etc.
+ Notes: State of idea currently unknown. Storage resources in the dir
+ config currently translate to very slim catalog entries; these
+ entries would require extensions to implement what is described
+ here. Quite possibly, numerous other statements that are currently
+ available in Pool resources could be used in Storage resources too
+ quite well.
-Item 13: Message mailing based on backup types
+Item 18: Message mailing based on backup types
Origin: Evan Kaufman <evan.kaufman@gmail.com>
Date: January 6, 2006
Status:
or Incremental/Differential Backups (which would likely be kept
onsite).
- Notes: One way this could be done is through additional message types, for example:
+ Notes: One way this could be done is through additional message types, for
+ example:
Messages {
# email the boss only on full system backups
Notes: Kern: This should be rather trivial to implement.
-Item 14: Ability to reconnect a disconnected comm line
- Date: 26 April 2009
- Origin: Kern/Eric
- Status:
- What: Often jobs fail because of a communications line drop. In that
- case, Bacula should be able to reconnect to the other daemon and
- resume the job.
+Item 19: Handle Windows Encrypted Files using Win raw encryption
+ Origin: Michael Mohr, SAG Mohr.External@infineon.com
+ Date: 22 February 2008
+ Origin: Alex Ehrlich (Alex.Ehrlich-at-mail.ee)
+ Date: 05 August 2008
+ Status:
- Why: Avoids backuping data already saved.
+ What: Make it possible to backup and restore Encypted Files from and to
+ Windows systems without the need to decrypt it by using the raw
+ encryption functions API (see:
+ http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363783.aspx)
+ that is provided for that reason by Microsoft.
+ If a file ist encrypted could be examined by evaluating the
+ FILE_ATTRIBUTE_ENCRYTED flag of the GetFileAttributes
+ function.
+ For each file backed up or restored by FD on Windows, check if
+ the file is encrypted; if so then use OpenEncryptedFileRaw,
+ ReadEncryptedFileRaw, WriteEncryptedFileRaw,
+ CloseEncryptedFileRaw instead of BackupRead and BackupWrite
+ API calls.
- Notes: *Very* complicated from a design point of view because of authenication.
+ Why: Without the usage of this interface the fd-daemon running
+ under the system account can't read encypted Files because
+ the key needed for the decrytion is missed by them. As a result
+ actually encrypted files are not backed up
+ by bacula and also no error is shown while missing these files.
+ Notes: Using xxxEncryptedFileRaw API would allow to backup and
+ restore EFS-encrypted files without decrypting their data.
+ Note that such files cannot be restored "portably" (at least,
+ easily) but they would be restoreable to a different (or
+ reinstalled) Win32 machine; the restore would require setup
+ of a EFS recovery agent in advance, of course, and this shall
+ be clearly reflected in the documentation, but this is the
+ normal Windows SysAdmin's business.
+ When "portable" backup is requested the EFS-encrypted files
+ shall be clearly reported as errors.
+ See MSDN on the "Backup and Restore of Encrypted Files" topic:
+ http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363783.aspx
+ Maybe the EFS support requires a new flag in the database for
+ each file, too?
+ Unfortunately, the implementation is not as straightforward as
+ 1-to-1 replacement of BackupRead with ReadEncryptedFileRaw,
+ requiring some FD code rewrite to work with
+ encrypted-file-related callback functions.
-Item 15: Include timestamp of job launch in "stat clients" output
- Origin: Mark Bergman <mark.bergman@uphs.upenn.edu>
- Date: Tue Aug 22 17:13:39 EDT 2006
+Item 20: Job migration between different SDs
+Origin: Mariusz Czulada <manieq AT wp DOT eu>
+Date: 07 May 2007
+Status: NEW
+
+What: Allow to specify in migration job devices on Storage Daemon other then
+ the one used for migrated jobs (possibly on different/distant host)
+
+Why: Sometimes we have more then one system which requires backup
+ implementation. Often, these systems are functionally unrelated and
+ placed in different locations. Having a big backup device (a tape
+ library) in each location is not cost-effective. It would be much
+ better to have one powerful enough tape library which could handle
+ backups from all systems, assuming relatively fast and reliable WAN
+ connections. In such architecture backups are done in service windows
+ on local bacula servers, then migrated to central storage off the peak
+ hours.
+
+Notes: If migration to different SD is working, migration to the same SD, as
+ now, could be done the same way (i mean 'localhost') to unify the
+ whole process
+
+Item 19. Allow FD to initiate a backup
+Origin: Frank Volf (frank at deze dot org)
+Date: 17 November 2005
+Status:
+
+What: Provide some means, possibly by a restricted console that
+ allows a FD to initiate a backup, and that uses the connection
+ established by the FD to the Director for the backup so that
+ a Director that is firewalled can do the backup.
+Why: Makes backup of laptops much easier.
+Notes: - The FD already has code for the monitor interface
+ - It could be nice to have a .job command that lists authorized
+ jobs.
+ - Commands need to be restricted on the Director side
+ (for example by re-using the runscript flag)
+ - The Client resource can be used to authorize the connection
+ - In a first time, the client can't modify job parameters
+ - We need a way to run a status command to follow job progression
+
+ This project consists of the following points
+ 1. Modify the FD to have a "mini-console" interface that
+ permits it to connect to the Director and start a
+ backup job of itself.
+ 2. The list of jobs that can be started by the FD are
+ defined in the Director (possibly via a restricted
+ console).
+ 3. Modify the existing tray monitor code in the Win32 FD
+ so that it is a separate program from the FD.
+ 4. The tray monitor program should be extended to permit
+ initiating a backup.
+ 5. No new Director directives should be added without
+ prior consultation with the Bacula developers.
+ 6. The comm line used by the FD to connect to the Director
+ should be re-used by the Director to do the backup.
+ This feature is partially implemented in the Director.
+ 7. The FD may have a new directive that allows it to start
+ a backup when the FD starts.
+ 8. The console interface to the FD should be extended to
+ permit a properly authorized console to initiate a
+ backup via the FD.
+
+
+Item 21: Implement Storage daemon compression
+ Date: 18 December 2006
+ Origin: Vadim A. Umanski , e-mail umanski@ext.ru
Status:
+ What: The ability to compress backup data on the SD receiving data
+ instead of doing that on client sending data.
+ Why: The need is practical. I've got some machines that can send
+ data to the network 4 or 5 times faster than compressing
+ them (I've measured that). They're using fast enough SCSI/FC
+ disk subsystems but rather slow CPUs (ex. UltraSPARC II).
+ And the backup server has got a quite fast CPUs (ex. Dual P4
+ Xeons) and quite a low load. When you have 20, 50 or 100 GB
+ of raw data - running a job 4 to 5 times faster - that
+ really matters. On the other hand, the data can be
+ compressed 50% or better - so losing twice more space for
+ disk backup is not good at all. And the network is all mine
+ (I have a dedicated management/provisioning network) and I
+ can get as high bandwidth as I need - 100Mbps, 1000Mbps...
+ That's why the server-side compression feature is needed!
+ Notes:
- What: The "stat clients" command doesn't include any detail on when
- the active backup jobs were launched.
+Item 22: Ability to import/export Bacula database entities
+ Date: 26 April 2009
+ Origin: Eric
+ Status:
- Why: Including the timestamp would make it much easier to decide whether
- a job is running properly.
+ What: Create a Bacula ASCII SQL database independent format that permits
+ importing and exporting database catalog Job entities.
- Notes: It may be helpful to have the output from "stat clients" formatted
- more like that from "stat dir" (and other commands), in a column
- format. The per-client information that's currently shown (level,
- client name, JobId, Volume, pool, device, Files, etc.) is good, but
- somewhat hard to parse (both programmatically and visually),
- particularly when there are many active clients.
+ Why: For achival, database clustering, tranfer to other databases
+ of any SQL engine.
+
+ Notes: Job selection should be by Job, time, Volume, Client, Pool and possibly
+ other criteria.
+
+
+Item 23: Implementation of running Job speed limit.
+Origin: Alex F, alexxzell at yahoo dot com
+Date: 29 January 2009
+What: I noticed the need for an integrated bandwidth limiter for
+ running jobs. It would be very useful just to specify another
+ field in bacula-dir.conf, like speed = how much speed you wish
+ for that specific job to run at
+Why: Because of a couple of reasons. First, it's very hard to implement a
+ traffic shaping utility and also make it reliable. Second, it is very
+ uncomfortable to have to implement these apps to, let's say 50 clients
+ (including desktops, servers). This would also be unreliable because you
+ have to make sure that the apps are properly working when needed; users
+ could also disable them (accidentally or not). It would be very useful
+ to provide Bacula this ability. All information would be centralized,
+ you would not have to go to 50 different clients in 10 different
+ locations for configuration; eliminating 3rd party additions help in
+ establishing efficiency. Would also avoid bandwidth congestion,
+ especially where there is little available.
-Item 16: Add an override in Schedule for Pools based on backup types
+Item 24: Add an override in Schedule for Pools based on backup types
Date: 19 Jan 2005
Origin: Chad Slater <chad.slater@clickfox.com>
Status:
backups, then the Full job would use the proper Storage device, which
has more capacity (i.e. a 8TB tape library.
-Item 17: Automatic promotion of backup levels based on backup size
+
+Item 25: Automatic promotion of backup levels based on backup size
Date: 19 January 2006
Origin: Adam Thornton <athornton@sinenomine.net>
Status:
programs can do and we can't (at least, the one cool thing I know
of).
-Item 18: Allow inclusion/exclusion of files in a fileset by creation/mod times
+
+Item 26: Allow FileSet inclusion/exclusion by creation/mod times
Origin: Evan Kaufman <evan.kaufman@gmail.com>
Date: January 11, 2006
Status:
or 'since'.
-
-Item 19: Archival (removal) of User Files to Tape
+Item 27: Archival (removal) of User Files to Tape
Date: Nov. 24/2005
Origin: Ray Pengelly [ray at biomed dot queensu dot ca
Status:
access time. Then after another 6 months (or possibly as one
storage pool gets full) data is migrated to Tape.
+Item 28: Ability to reconnect a disconnected comm line
+ Date: 26 April 2009
+ Origin: Kern/Eric
+ Status:
-Item 20: Include all conf files in specified directory
-Date: 18 October 2008
-Origin: Database, Lda. Maputo, Mozambique
-Contact:Cameron Smith / cameron.ord@database.co.mz
-Status: New request
-
-What: A directive something like "IncludeConf = /etc/bacula/subconfs" Every
- time Bacula Director restarts or reloads, it will walk the given
- directory (non-recursively) and include the contents of any files
- therein, as though they were appended to bacula-dir.conf
+ What: Often jobs fail because of a communications line drop. In that
+ case, Bacula should be able to reconnect to the other daemon and
+ resume the job.
-Why: Permits simplified and safer configuration for larger installations with
- many client PCs. Currently, through judicious use of JobDefs and
- similar directives, it is possible to reduce the client-specific part of
- a configuration to a minimum. The client-specific directives can be
- prepared according to a standard template and dropped into a known
- directory. However it is still necessary to add a line to the "master"
- (bacula-dir.conf) referencing each new file. This exposes the master to
- unnecessary risk of accidental mistakes and makes automation of adding
- new client-confs, more difficult (it is easier to automate dropping a
- file into a dir, than rewriting an existing file). Ken has previously
- made a convincing argument for NOT including Bacula's core configuration
- in an RDBMS, but I believe that the present request is a reasonable
- extension to the current "flat-file-based" configuration philosophy.
-
-Notes: There is NO need for any special syntax to these files. They should
- contain standard directives which are simply "inlined" to the parent
- file as already happens when you explicitly reference an external file.
+ Why: Avoids backuping data already saved.
-Notes: (kes) this can already be done with scripting
- From: John Jorgensen <jorgnsn@lcd.uregina.ca>
- The bacula-dir.conf at our site contains these lines:
+ Notes: *Very* complicated from a design point of view because of authenication.
- #
- # Include subfiles associated with configuration of clients.
- # They define the bulk of the Clients, Jobs, and FileSets.
- #
- @|"sh -c 'for f in /etc/bacula/clientdefs/*.conf ; do echo @${f} ; done'"
+Item 29: Multiple threads in file daemon for the same job
+ Date: 27 November 2005
+ Origin: Ove Risberg (Ove.Risberg at octocode dot com)
+ Status:
- and when we get a new client, we just put its configuration into
- a new file called something like:
+ What: I want the file daemon to start multiple threads for a backup
+ job so the fastest possible backup can be made.
- /etc/bacula/clientdefs/clientname.conf
+ The file daemon could parse the FileSet information and start
+ one thread for each File entry located on a separate
+ filesystem.
+ A confiuration option in the job section should be used to
+ enable or disable this feature. The confgutration option could
+ specify the maximum number of threads in the file daemon.
+ If the theads could spool the data to separate spool files
+ the restore process will not be much slower.
+ Why: Multiple concurrent backups of a large fileserver with many
+ disks and controllers will be much faster.
-Item 21: Implement an interface between Bacula and Amazon's S3.
- Date: 25 August 2008
- Origin: Soren Hansen <soren@ubuntu.com>
- Status: Not started.
- What: Enable the storage daemon to store backup data on Amazon's
- S3 service.
+ Notes: (KES) This is not necessary and could be accomplished
+ by having two jobs. In addition, the current VSS code
+ is single thread.
- Why: Amazon's S3 is a cheap way to store data off-site. Current
- ways to integrate Bacula and S3 involve storing all the data
- locally and syncing them to S3, and manually fetching them
- again when they're needed. This is very cumbersome.
+Item 30: Automatic disabling of devices
+ Date: 2005-11-11
+ Origin: Peter Eriksson <peter at ifm.liu dot se>
+ Status:
-Item 22: Enable/disable compression depending on storage device (disk/tape)
- Origin: Ralf Gross ralf-lists@ralfgross.de
- Date: 2008-01-11
- Status: Initial Request
+ What: After a configurable amount of fatal errors with a tape drive
+ Bacula should automatically disable further use of a certain
+ tape drive. There should also be "disable"/"enable" commands in
+ the "bconsole" tool.
- What: Add a new option to the storage resource of the director. Depending
- on this option, compression will be enabled/disabled for a device.
+ Why: On a multi-drive jukebox there is a possibility of tape drives
+ going bad during large backups (needing a cleaning tape run,
+ tapes getting stuck). It would be advantageous if Bacula would
+ automatically disable further use of a problematic tape drive
+ after a configurable amount of errors has occurred.
- Why: If different devices (disks/tapes) are used for full/diff/incr
- backups, software compression will be enabled for all backups
- because of the FileSet compression option. For backup to tapes
- wich are able to do hardware compression this is not desired.
-
+ An example: I have a multi-drive jukebox (6 drives, 380+ slots)
+ where tapes occasionally get stuck inside the drive. Bacula will
+ notice that the "mtx-changer" command will fail and then fail
+ any backup jobs trying to use that drive. However, it will still
+ keep on trying to run new jobs using that drive and fail -
+ forever, and thus failing lots and lots of jobs... Since we have
+ many drives Bacula could have just automatically disabled
+ further use of that drive and used one of the other ones
+ instead.
- Notes:
- http://news.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.backup.bacula.devel/cutoff=11124
- It must be clear to the user, that the FileSet compression option
- must still be enabled use compression for a backup job at all.
- Thus a name for the new option in the director must be
- well-defined.
- Notes: KES I think the Storage definition should probably override what
- is in the Job definition or vice-versa, but in any case, it must
- be well defined.
+Item 31: Enable persistent naming/number of SQL queries
+ Date: 24 Jan, 2007
+ Origin: Mark Bergman
+ Status:
+ What:
+ Change the parsing of the query.sql file and the query command so that
+ queries are named/numbered by a fixed value, not their order in the
+ file.
-Item 31: Backup and Restore of Windows Encrypted Files using Win raw encryption
- Origin: Michael Mohr, SAG Mohr.External@infineon.com
- Date: 22 February 2008
- Origin: Alex Ehrlich (Alex.Ehrlich-at-mail.ee)
- Date: 05 August 2008
- Status:
- What: Make it possible to backup and restore Encypted Files from and to
- Windows systems without the need to decrypt it by using the raw
- encryption functions API (see:
- http://msdn2.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363783.aspx)
- that is provided for that reason by Microsoft.
- If a file ist encrypted could be examined by evaluating the
- FILE_ATTRIBUTE_ENCRYTED flag of the GetFileAttributes
- function.
- For each file backed up or restored by FD on Windows, check if
- the file is encrypted; if so then use OpenEncryptedFileRaw,
- ReadEncryptedFileRaw, WriteEncryptedFileRaw,
- CloseEncryptedFileRaw instead of BackupRead and BackupWrite
- API calls.
-
- Why: Without the usage of this interface the fd-daemon running
- under the system account can't read encypted Files because
- the key needed for the decrytion is missed by them. As a result
- actually encrypted files are not backed up
- by bacula and also no error is shown while missing these files.
-
- Notes: Using xxxEncryptedFileRaw API would allow to backup and
- restore EFS-encrypted files without decrypting their data.
- Note that such files cannot be restored "portably" (at least,
- easily) but they would be restoreable to a different (or
- reinstalled) Win32 machine; the restore would require setup
- of a EFS recovery agent in advance, of course, and this shall
- be clearly reflected in the documentation, but this is the
- normal Windows SysAdmin's business.
- When "portable" backup is requested the EFS-encrypted files
- shall be clearly reported as errors.
- See MSDN on the "Backup and Restore of Encrypted Files" topic:
- http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa363783.aspx
- Maybe the EFS support requires a new flag in the database for
- each file, too?
- Unfortunately, the implementation is not as straightforward as
- 1-to-1 replacement of BackupRead with ReadEncryptedFileRaw,
- requiring some FD code rewrite to work with
- encrypted-file-related callback functions.
-
-Item 24: Data encryption on storage daemon
- Origin: Tobias Barth <tobias.barth at web-arts.com>
- Date: 04 February 2009
- Status: new
-
- What: The storage demon should be able to do the data encryption that can currently be done by the file daemon.
-
- Why: This would have 2 advantages: 1) one could encrypt the data of unencrypted tapes by doing a migration job, and 2) the storage daemon would be the only machine that would have to keep the encryption keys.
-
- Notes from Landon:
- As an addendum to the feature request, here are some crypto
- implementation details I wrote up regarding SD-encryption back in Jan
- 2008:
- http://www.mail-archive.com/bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net/msg28860.html
-
-
-
-Item 25: "Maximum Concurrent Jobs" for drives when used with changer device
- Origin: Ralf Gross ralf-lists <at> ralfgross.de
- Date: 2008-12-12
- Status: Initial Request
-
- What: respect the "Maximum Concurrent Jobs" directive in the _drives_
- Storage section in addition to the changer section
-
- Why: I have a 3 drive changer where I want to be able to let 3 concurrent
- jobs run in parallel. But only one job per drive at the same time.
- Right now I don't see how I could limit the number of concurrent jobs
- per drive in this situation.
-
- Notes: Using different priorities for these jobs lead to problems that other
- jobs are blocked. On the user list I got the advice to use the "Prefer Mounted
- Volumes" directive, but Kern advised against using "Prefer Mounted
- Volumes" in an other thread:
- http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.sysutils.backup.bacula.devel/11876/
-
- In addition I'm not sure if this would be the same as respecting the
- drive's "Maximum Concurrent Jobs" setting.
-
- Example:
-
- Storage {
- Name = Neo4100
- Address = ....
- SDPort = 9103
- Password = "wiped"
- Device = Neo4100
- Media Type = LTO4
- Autochanger = yes
- Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 3
- }
-
- Storage {
- Name = Neo4100-LTO4-D1
- Address = ....
- SDPort = 9103
- Password = "wiped"
- Device = ULTRIUM-TD4-D1
- Media Type = LTO4
- Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 1
- }
-
- [2 more drives]
-
- The "Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 1" directive in the drive's section is ignored.
-
-Item 26: Add MaxVolumeSize/MaxVolumeBytes statement to Storage resource
- Origin: Bastian Friedrich <bastian.friedrich@collax.com>
- Date: 2008-07-09
- Status: -
-
- What: SD has a "Maximum Volume Size" statement, which is deprecated and
- superseded by the Pool resource statement "Maximum Volume Bytes".
- It would be good if either statement could be used in Storage
- resources.
-
- Why: Pools do not have to be restricted to a single storage type/device;
- thus, it may be impossible to define Maximum Volume Bytes in the
- Pool resource. The old MaxVolSize statement is deprecated, as it
- is SD side only. I am using the same pool for different devices.
-
- Notes: State of idea currently unknown. Storage resources in the dir
- config currently translate to very slim catalog entries; these
- entries would require extensions to implement what is described
- here. Quite possibly, numerous other statements that are currently
- available in Pool resources could be used in Storage resources too
- quite well.
-
-Item 27: Start spooling even when waiting on tape
- Origin: Tobias Barth <tobias.barth@web-arts.com>
- Date: 25 April 2008
- Status:
-
- What: If a job can be spooled to disk before writing it to tape, it should
- be spooled immediately. Currently, bacula waits until the correct
- tape is inserted into the drive.
-
- Why: It could save hours. When bacula waits on the operator who must insert
- the correct tape (e.g. a new tape or a tape from another media
- pool), bacula could already prepare the spooled data in the spooling
- directory and immediately start despooling when the tape was
- inserted by the operator.
-
- 2nd step: Use 2 or more spooling directories. When one directory is
- currently despooling, the next (on different disk drives) could
- already be spooling the next data.
-
- Notes: I am using bacula 2.2.8, which has none of those features
- implemented.
-
-Item 28: Enable persistent naming/number of SQL queries
- Date: 24 Jan, 2007
- Origin: Mark Bergman
- Status:
-
- What:
- Change the parsing of the query.sql file and the query command so that
- queries are named/numbered by a fixed value, not their order in the
- file.
-
-
- Why:
- One of the real strengths of bacula is the ability to query the
- database, and the fact that complex queries can be saved and
- referenced from a file is very powerful. However, the choice
- of query (both for interactive use, and by scripting input
- to the bconsole command) is completely dependent on the order
- within the query.sql file. The descriptve labels are helpful for
- interactive use, but users become used to calling a particular
- query "by number", or may use scripts to execute queries. This
- presents a problem if the number or order of queries in the file
- changes.
+ Why:
+ One of the real strengths of bacula is the ability to query the
+ database, and the fact that complex queries can be saved and
+ referenced from a file is very powerful. However, the choice
+ of query (both for interactive use, and by scripting input
+ to the bconsole command) is completely dependent on the order
+ within the query.sql file. The descriptve labels are helpful for
+ interactive use, but users become used to calling a particular
+ query "by number", or may use scripts to execute queries. This
+ presents a problem if the number or order of queries in the file
+ changes.
If the query.sql file used the numeric tags as a real value (rather
than a comment), then users could have a higher confidence that they
Alternatively, queries could be called by keyword (tag), rather
than by number.
-Item 29: Implementation of running Job speed limit.
-Origin: Alex F, alexxzell at yahoo dot com
-Date: 29 January 2009
-
-What: I noticed the need for an integrated bandwidth limiter for
- running jobs. It would be very useful just to specify another
- field in bacula-dir.conf, like speed = how much speed you wish
- for that specific job to run at
-
-Why: Because of a couple of reasons. First, it's very hard to implement a
- traffic shaping utility and also make it reliable. Second, it is very
- uncomfortable to have to implement these apps to, let's say 50 clients
- (including desktops, servers). This would also be unreliable because you
- have to make sure that the apps are properly working when needed; users
- could also disable them (accidentally or not). It would be very useful
- to provide Bacula this ability. All information would be centralized,
- you would not have to go to 50 different clients in 10 different
- locations for configuration; eliminating 3rd party additions help in
- establishing efficiency. Would also avoid bandwidth congestion,
- especially where there is little available.
-
-Item 30: Restore from volumes on multiple storage daemons
-Origin: Graham Keeling (graham@equiinet.com)
-Date: 12 March 2009
-Status: Proposing
-
-What: The ability to restore from volumes held by multiple storage daemons
- would be very useful.
-
-Why: It is useful to be able to backup to any number of different storage
- daemons. For example, your first storage daemon may run out of space, so you
- switch to your second and carry on. Bacula will currently let you do this.
- However, once you come to restore, bacula cannot cope when volumes on different
- storage daemons are required.
-
- Notes: The director knows that more than one storage daemon is needed, as
- bconsole outputs something like the following table.
-
- The job will require the following
- Volume(s) Storage(s) SD Device(s)
- ===========================================================================
-
- backup-0001 Disk 1 Disk 1.0
- backup-0002 Disk 2 Disk 2.0
-
- However, the bootstrap file that it creates gets sent to the first storage
- daemon only, which then stalls for a long time, 'waiting for a mount request'
- for the volume that it doesn't have.
- The bootstrap file contains no knowledge of the storage daemon.
- Under the current design:
-
- The director connects to the storage daemon, and gets an sd_auth_key.
- The director then connects to the file daemon, and gives it the
- sd_auth_key with the 'jobcmd'.
- (restoring of files happens)
- The director does a 'wait_for_storage_daemon_termination()'.
- The director waits for the file daemon to indicate the end of the job.
-
- With my idea:
-
- The director connects to the file daemon.
- Then, for each storage daemon in the .bsr file... {
- The director connects to the storage daemon, and gets an sd_auth_key.
- The director then connects to the file daemon, and gives it the
- sd_auth_key with the 'storaddr' command.
- (restoring of files happens)
- The director does a 'wait_for_storage_daemon_termination()'.
- The director waits for the file daemon to indicate the end of the
- work on this storage.
- }
- The director tells the file daemon that there are no more storages to contact.
- The director waits for the file daemon to indicate the end of the job.
-
- As you can see, each restore between the file daemon and storage daemon is
- handled in the same way that it is currently handled, using the same method
- for authentication, except that the sd_auth_key is moved from the 'jobcmd' to
- the 'storaddr' command - where it logically belongs.
-
-
-Item 31: 'restore' menu: enter a JobId, automatically select dependents
-Origin: Graham Keeling (graham@equiinet.com)
-Date: 13 March 2009
-
-Status: Proposing
-
-What: Add to the bconsole 'restore' menu the ability to select a job
- by JobId, and have bacula automatically select all the dependent jobs.
-
- Why: Currently, you either have to...
- a) laboriously type in a date that is greater than the date of the backup that
- you want and is less than the subsequent backup (bacula then figures out the
- dependent jobs), or
- b) manually figure out all the JobIds that you want and laboriously type them
- all in.
- It would be extremely useful (in a programmatical sense, as well as for humans)
- to be able to just give it a single JobId and let bacula do the hard work (work
- that it already knows how to do).
-
- Notes (Kern): I think this should either be modified to have Bacula print
- a list of dates that the user can choose from as is done in bwx-console and
- bat or the name of this command must be carefully chosen so that the user
- clearly understands that the JobId is being used to specify what Job and the
- date to which he wishes the restore to happen.
-
-
-
-Item 32: Possibilty to schedule Jobs on last Friday of the month
-Origin: Carsten Menke <bootsy52 at gmx dot net>
-Date: 02 March 2008
-Status:
- What: Currently if you want to run your monthly Backups on the last
- Friday of each month this is only possible with workarounds (e.g
- scripting) (As some months got 4 Fridays and some got 5 Fridays)
- The same is true if you plan to run your yearly Backups on the
- last Friday of the year. It would be nice to have the ability to
- use the builtin scheduler for this.
-
- Why: In many companies the last working day of the week is Friday (or
- Saturday), so to get the most data of the month onto the monthly
- tape, the employees are advised to insert the tape for the
- monthly backups on the last friday of the month.
-
- Notes: To give this a complete functionality it would be nice if the
- "first" and "last" Keywords could be implemented in the
- scheduler, so it is also possible to run monthy backups at the
- first friday of the month and many things more. So if the syntax
- would expand to this {first|last} {Month|Week|Day|Mo-Fri} of the
- {Year|Month|Week} you would be able to run really flexible jobs.
-
- To got a certain Job run on the last Friday of the Month for example one could
- then write
-
- Run = pool=Monthly last Fri of the Month at 23:50
+Item 32: Bacula Dir, FD and SD to support proxies
+Origin: Karl Grindley @ MIT Lincoln Laboratory <kgrindley at ll dot mit dot edu>
+Date: 25 March 2009
+Status: proposed
- ## Yearly Backup
+What: Support alternate methods for nailing up a TCP session such
+ as SOCKS5, SOCKS4 and HTTP (CONNECT) proxies. Such a feature
+ would allow tunneling of bacula traffic in and out of proxied
+ networks.
- Run = pool=Yearly last Fri of the Year at 23:50
+Why: Currently, bacula is architected to only function on a flat network, with
+ no barriers or limitations. Due to the large configuration states of
+ any network and the infinite configuration where file daemons and
+ storage daemons may sit in relation to one another, bacula often is
+ not usable on a network where filtered or air-gaped networks exist.
+ While often solutions such as ACL modifications to firewalls or port
+ redirection via SNAT or DNAT will solve the issue, often however,
+ these solutions are not adequate or not allowed by hard policy.
- ## Certain Jobs the last Week of a Month
+ In an air-gapped network with only a highly locked down proxy services
+ are provided (SOCKS4/5 and/or HTTP and/or SSH outbound) ACLs or
+ iptable rules will not work.
- Run = pool=LastWeek last Week of the Month at 23:50
+Notes: Director resource tunneling: This configuration option to utilize a
+ proxy to connect to a client should be specified in the client
+ resource Client resource tunneling: should be configured in the client
+ resource in the director config file? Or configured on the bacula-fd
+ configuration file on the fd host itself? If the ladder, this would
+ allow only certain clients to use a proxy, where others do not when
+ establishing the TCP connection to the storage server.
- ## Monthly Backup on the last day of the month
+ Also worth noting, there are other 3rd party, light weight apps that
+ could be utilized to bootstrap this. Instead of sockifing bacula
+ itself, use an external program to broker proxy authentication, and
+ connection to the remote host. OpenSSH does this by using the
+ "ProxyCommand" syntax in the client configuration and uses stdin and
+ stdout to the command. Connect.c is a very popular one.
+ (http://bent.latency.net/bent/darcs/goto-san-connect-1.85/src/connect.html).
+ One could also possibly use stunnel, netcat, etc.
- Run = pool=Monthly last Day of the Month at 23:50
Item 33: Add Minumum Spool Size directive
Date: 20 March 2008
gigabytes) it can easily produce multi-megabyte report emails!
-Item 34: Cause daemons to use a specific IP address to source communications
- Origin: Bill Moran <wmoran@collaborativefusion.com>
- Date: 18 Dec 2006
- Status:
- What: Cause Bacula daemons (dir, fd, sd) to always use the ip address
- specified in the [DIR|DF|SD]Addr directive as the source IP
- for initiating communication.
- Why: On complex networks, as well as extremely secure networks, it's
- not unusual to have multiple possible routes through the network.
- Often, each of these routes is secured by different policies
- (effectively, firewalls allow or deny different traffic depending
- on the source address)
- Unfortunately, it can sometimes be difficult or impossible to
- represent this in a system routing table, as the result is
- excessive subnetting that quickly exhausts available IP space.
- The best available workaround is to provide multiple IPs to
- a single machine that are all on the same subnet. In order
- for this to work properly, applications must support the ability
- to bind outgoing connections to a specified address, otherwise
- the operating system will always choose the first IP that
- matches the required route.
- Notes: Many other programs support this. For example, the following
- can be configured in BIND:
- query-source address 10.0.0.1;
- transfer-source 10.0.0.2;
- Which means queries from this server will always come from
- 10.0.0.1 and zone transfers will always originate from
- 10.0.0.2.
-
-
-
-Item 35: Add ability to Verify any specified Job.
-Date: 17 January 2008
-Origin: portrix.net Hamburg, Germany.
-Contact: Christian Sabelmann
-Status: 70% of the required Code is part of the Verify function since v. 2.x
- What:
- The ability to tell Bacula which Job should verify instead of
- automatically verify just the last one.
- Why:
- It is sad that such a powerfull feature like Verify Jobs
- (VolumeToCatalog) is restricted to be used only with the last backup Job
- of a client. Actual users who have to do daily Backups are forced to
- also do daily Verify Jobs in order to take advantage of this useful
- feature. This Daily Verify after Backup conduct is not always desired
- and Verify Jobs have to be sometimes scheduled. (Not necessarily
- scheduled in Bacula). With this feature Admins can verify Jobs once a
- Week or less per month, selecting the Jobs they want to verify. This
- feature is also not to difficult to implement taking in account older bug
- reports about this feature and the selection of the Job to be verified.
-
- Notes: For the verify Job, the user could select the Job to be verified
- from a List of the latest Jobs of a client. It would also be possible to
- verify a certain volume. All of these would naturaly apply only for
- Jobs whose file information are still in the catalog.
-Item 36: Automatic disabling of devices
- Date: 2005-11-11
- Origin: Peter Eriksson <peter at ifm.liu dot se>
- Status:
+Item 34: Command that releases all drives in an autochanger
+ Origin: Blake Dunlap (blake@nxs.net)
+ Date: 10/07/2009
+ Status: Request
+
+ What: It would be nice if there was a release command that
+ would release all drives in an autochanger instead of having to
+ do each one in turn.
+
+ Why: It can take some time for a release to occur, and the
+ commands must be given for each drive in turn, which can quicky
+ scale if there are several drives in the library. (Having to
+ watch the console, to give each command can waste a good bit of
+ time when you start getting into the 16 drive range when the
+ tapes can take up to 3 minutes to eject each)
+
+ Notes: Due to the way some autochangers/libraries work, you
+ cannot assume that new tapes inserted will go into slots that are
+ not currently believed to be in use by bacula (the tape from that
+ slot is in a drive). This would make any changes in
+ configuration quicker/easier, as all drives need to be released
+ before any modifications to slots.
+
+Item 35: Run bscan on a remote storage daemon from within bconsole.
+ Date: 07 October 2009
+ Origin: Graham Keeling <graham@equiinet.com>
+ Status: Proposing
+
+ What: The ability to be able to run bscan on a remote storage daemon from
+ within bconsole in order to populate your catalog.
+
+ Why: Currently, it seems you have to:
+ a) log in to a console on the remote machine
+ b) figure out where the storage daemon config file is
+ c) figure out the storage device from the config file
+ d) figure out the catalog IP address
+ e) figure out the catalog port
+ f) open the port on the catalog firewall
+ g) configure the catalog database to accept connections from the
+ remote host
+ h) build a 'bscan' command from (b)-(e) above and run it
+ It would be much nicer to be able to type something like this into
+ bconsole:
+ *bscan storage=<storage> device=<device> volume=<volume>
+ or something like:
+ *bscan storage=<storage> all
+ It seems to me that the scan could also do a better job than the
+ external bscan program currently does. It would possibly be able to
+ deduce some extra details, such as the catalog StorageId for the
+ volumes.
+
+ Notes: (Kern). If you need to do a bscan, you have done something wrong,
+ so this functionality should not need to be integrated into the
+ the Storage daemon. However, I am not opposed to someone implementing
+ this feature providing that all the code is in a shared object (or dll)
+ and does not add significantly to the size of the Storage daemon. In
+ addition, the code should be written in a way such that the same source
+ code is used in both the bscan program and the Storage daemon to avoid
+ adding a lot of new code that must be maintained by the project.
+
+Item 36: Implement a Migration job type that will create a reverse
+ incremental (or decremental) backup from two existing full backups.
+ Date: 05 October 2009
+ Origin: Griffith College Dublin. Some sponsorship available.
+ Contact: Gavin McCullagh <gavin.mccullagh@gcd.ie>
+ Status:
- What: After a configurable amount of fatal errors with a tape drive
- Bacula should automatically disable further use of a certain
- tape drive. There should also be "disable"/"enable" commands in
- the "bconsole" tool.
+ What: The ability to take two full backup jobs and derive a reverse
+ incremental backup from them. The older full backup data may then
+ be discarded.
- Why: On a multi-drive jukebox there is a possibility of tape drives
- going bad during large backups (needing a cleaning tape run,
- tapes getting stuck). It would be advantageous if Bacula would
- automatically disable further use of a problematic tape drive
- after a configurable amount of errors has occurred.
+ Why: Long-term backups based on keeping full backups can be expensive in
+ media. In many cases (eg a NAS), as the client accumulates files
+ over months and years, the same file will be duplicated unchanged,
+ across many media and datasets. Eg, Less than 10% (and
+ shrinking) of our monthly full mail server backup is new files,
+ the other 90% is also in the previous full backup.
+ Regularly converting the oldest full backup into a reverse
+ incremental backup allows the admin to keep access to old backup
+ jobs, but remove all of the duplicated files, freeing up media.
- An example: I have a multi-drive jukebox (6 drives, 380+ slots)
- where tapes occasionally get stuck inside the drive. Bacula will
- notice that the "mtx-changer" command will fail and then fail
- any backup jobs trying to use that drive. However, it will still
- keep on trying to run new jobs using that drive and fail -
- forever, and thus failing lots and lots of jobs... Since we have
- many drives Bacula could have just automatically disabled
- further use of that drive and used one of the other ones
- instead.
+ Notes: This feature was previously discussed on the bacula-devel list
+ here: http://www.mail-archive.com/bacula-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg04962.html
-Item 37: An option to operate on all pools with update vol parameters
- Origin: Dmitriy Pinchukov <absh@bossdev.kiev.ua>
- Date: 16 August 2006
- Status: Patch made by Nigel Stepp
+Item 37: Separate "Storage" and "Device" in the bacula-dir.conf
+ Date: 29 April 2009
+ Origin: "James Harper" <james.harper@bendigoit.com.au>
+ Status: not implemented or documented
- What: When I do update -> Volume parameters -> All Volumes
- from Pool, then I have to select pools one by one. I'd like
- console to have an option like "0: All Pools" in the list of
- defined pools.
+ What: Separate "Storage" and "Device" in the bacula-dir.conf
+ The resulting config would looks something like:
- Why: I have many pools and therefore unhappy with manually
- updating each of them using update -> Volume parameters -> All
- Volumes from Pool -> pool #.
+ Storage {
+ Name = name_of_server
+ Address = hostname/IP address
+ SDPort = 9103
+ Password = shh_its_a_secret
+ Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 7
+ }
-Item 38: Implement Storage daemon compression
- Date: 18 December 2006
- Origin: Vadim A. Umanski , e-mail umanski@ext.ru
- Status:
- What: The ability to compress backup data on the SD receiving data
- instead of doing that on client sending data.
- Why: The need is practical. I've got some machines that can send
- data to the network 4 or 5 times faster than compressing
- them (I've measured that). They're using fast enough SCSI/FC
- disk subsystems but rather slow CPUs (ex. UltraSPARC II).
- And the backup server has got a quite fast CPUs (ex. Dual P4
- Xeons) and quite a low load. When you have 20, 50 or 100 GB
- of raw data - running a job 4 to 5 times faster - that
- really matters. On the other hand, the data can be
- compressed 50% or better - so losing twice more space for
- disk backup is not good at all. And the network is all mine
- (I have a dedicated management/provisioning network) and I
- can get as high bandwidth as I need - 100Mbps, 1000Mbps...
- That's why the server-side compression feature is needed!
- Notes:
+ Device {
+ Name = name_of_device
+ Storage = name_of_server
+ Device = name_of_device_on_sd
+ Media Type = media_type
+ Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 1
+ }
-Item 39: Improve Bacula's tape and drive usage and cleaning management
- Date: 8 November 2005, November 11, 2005
- Origin: Adam Thornton <athornton at sinenomine dot net>,
- Arno Lehmann <al at its-lehmann dot de>
- Status:
+ Maximum Concurrent Jobs would be specified with a server and a device
+ maximum, which would both be honoured by the director. Almost everything
+ that mentions a 'Storage' would need to be changed to 'Device', although
+ perhaps a 'Storage' would just be a synonym for 'Device' for backwards
+ compatibility...
- What: Make Bacula manage tape life cycle information, tape reuse
- times and drive cleaning cycles.
-
- Why: All three parts of this project are important when operating
- backups.
- We need to know which tapes need replacement, and we need to
- make sure the drives are cleaned when necessary. While many
- tape libraries and even autoloaders can handle all this
- automatically, support by Bacula can be helpful for smaller
- (older) libraries and single drives. Limiting the number of
- times a tape is used might prevent tape errors when using
- tapes until the drives can't read it any more. Also, checking
- drive status during operation can prevent some failures (as I
- [Arno] had to learn the hard way...)
-
- Notes: First, Bacula could (and even does, to some limited extent)
- record tape and drive usage. For tapes, the number of mounts,
- the amount of data, and the time the tape has actually been
- running could be recorded. Data fields for Read and Write
- time and Number of mounts already exist in the catalog (I'm
- not sure if VolBytes is the sum of all bytes ever written to
- that volume by Bacula). This information can be important
- when determining which media to replace. The ability to mark
- Volumes as "used up" after a given number of write cycles
- should also be implemented so that a tape is never actually
- worn out. For the tape drives known to Bacula, similar
- information is interesting to determine the device status and
- expected life time: Time it's been Reading and Writing, number
- of tape Loads / Unloads / Errors. This information is not yet
- recorded as far as I [Arno] know. A new volume status would
- be necessary for the new state, like "Used up" or "Worn out".
- Volumes with this state could be used for restores, but not
- for writing. These volumes should be migrated first (assuming
- migration is implemented) and, once they are no longer needed,
- could be moved to a Trash pool.
-
- The next step would be to implement a drive cleaning setup.
- Bacula already has knowledge about cleaning tapes. Once it
- has some information about cleaning cycles (measured in drive
- run time, number of tapes used, or calender days, for example)
- it can automatically execute tape cleaning (with an
- autochanger, obviously) or ask for operator assistance loading
- a cleaning tape.
-
- The final step would be to implement TAPEALERT checks not only
- when changing tapes and only sending the information to the
- administrator, but rather checking after each tape error,
- checking on a regular basis (for example after each tape
- file), and also before unloading and after loading a new tape.
- Then, depending on the drives TAPEALERT state and the known
- drive cleaning state Bacula could automatically schedule later
- cleaning, clean immediately, or inform the operator.
-
- Implementing this would perhaps require another catalog change
- and perhaps major changes in SD code and the DIR-SD protocol,
- so I'd only consider this worth implementing if it would
- actually be used or even needed by many people.
-
- Implementation of these projects could happen in three distinct
- sub-projects: Measuring Tape and Drive usage, retiring
- volumes, and handling drive cleaning and TAPEALERTs.
-
-Item 40: Multiple threads in file daemon for the same job
- Date: 27 November 2005
- Origin: Ove Risberg (Ove.Risberg at octocode dot com)
- Status:
+ Why: If you have multiple Storage definitions pointing to different
+ Devices in the same Storage daemon, the "status storage" command
+ prompts for each different device, but they all give the same
+ information.
- What: I want the file daemon to start multiple threads for a backup
- job so the fastest possible backup can be made.
+ Notes:
- The file daemon could parse the FileSet information and start
- one thread for each File entry located on a separate
- filesystem.
+Item 38: Least recently used device selection for tape drives in autochanger.
+Date: 12 October 2009
+Origin: Thomas Carter <tcarter@memc.com>
+Status: Proposal
- A confiuration option in the job section should be used to
- enable or disable this feature. The confgutration option could
- specify the maximum number of threads in the file daemon.
+What: A better tape drive selection algorithm for multi-drive
+ autochangers. The AUTOCHANGER class contains an array list of tape
+ devices. When a tape drive is needed, this list is always searched in
+ order. This causes lower number drives (specifically drive 0) to do a
+ majority of the work with higher numbered drives possibly never being
+ used. When a drive in an autochanger is reserved for use, its entry should
+ be moved to the end of the list; this would give a rough LRU drive
+ selection.
- If the theads could spool the data to separate spool files
- the restore process will not be much slower.
+Why: The current implementation places a majority of use and wear on drive
+ 0 of a multi-drive autochanger.
- Why: Multiple concurrent backups of a large fileserver with many
- disks and controllers will be much faster.
+Notes:
-========= End items voted on May 2009 ==================
+Item 39: Implement a Storage device like Amazon's S3.
+ Date: 25 August 2008
+ Origin: Soren Hansen <soren@ubuntu.com>
+ Status: Not started.
+ What: Enable the storage daemon to store backup data on Amazon's
+ S3 service.
-========= New items after last vote ====================
+ Why: Amazon's S3 is a cheap way to store data off-site.
+
+ Notes: If we configure the Pool to put only one job per volume (they don't
+ support append operation), and the volume size isn't to big (100MB?),
+ it should be easy to adapt the disk-changer script to add get/put
+ procedure with curl. So, the data would be safetly copied during the
+ Job.
+
+ Cloud should be only used with Copy jobs, users should always have
+ a copy of their data on their site.
-Item 1: Relabel disk volume after recycling
+ We should also think to have our own cache, trying always to have
+ cloud volume on the local disk. (I don't know if users want to store
+ 100GB on cloud, so it shouldn't be a disk size problem). For example,
+ if bacula want to recycle a volume, it will start by downloading the
+ file to truncate it few seconds later, if we can avoid that...
+
+Item 40: Convert tray monitor on Windows to a stand alone program
+ Date: 26 April 2009
+ Origin: Kern/Eric
+ Status:
+
+ What: Separate Win32 tray monitor to be a separate program.
+
+ Why: Vista does not allow SYSTEM services to interact with the
+ desktop, so the current tray monitor does not work on Vista
+ machines.
+
+ Notes: Requires communicating with the FD via the network (simulate
+ a console connection).
+
+Item 41: Improve Bacula's tape and drive usage and cleaning management
+ Date: 8 November 2005, November 11, 2005
+ Origin: Adam Thornton <athornton at sinenomine dot net>,
+ Arno Lehmann <al at its-lehmann dot de>
+ Status:
+
+ What:
+ 1. Measure tape and drive usage (mostly implemented)
+ 2. Retiring a volume when too old or too many errors
+ 3. Handle cleaning and tape alerts.
+
+ Why: Needed
+
+
+Item 42: Relabel disk volume after recycling
Origin: Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik@iki.fi>
Date: 07 May 2009.
Status: Not implemented yet, no code written.
- What: The ability to relabel the disk volume (and thus rename the file on the disk)
- after it has been recycled. Useful when you have a single job per disk volume,
- and you use a custom Label format, for example:
- Label Format = "${Client}-${Level}-${NumVols:p/4/0/r}-${Year}_${Month}_${Day}-${Hour}_${Minute}"
+ What: The ability to relabel the disk volume (and thus rename the file on the
+ disk) after it has been recycled. Useful when you have a single job
+ per disk volume, and you use a custom Label format, for example:
+ Label Format =
+ "${Client}-${Level}-${NumVols:p/4/0/r}-${Year}_${Month}_${Day}-${Hour}_${Minute}"
- Why: Disk volumes in Bacula get the label/filename when they are used for the first time.
- If you use recycling and custom label format like above, the disk
- volume name doesn't match the contents after it has been recycled.
- This feature makes it possible to keep the label/filename in sync
- with the content and thus makes it easy to check/monitor the backups
- from the shell and/or normal file management tools, because the filenames
- of the disk volumes match the content.
+ Why: Disk volumes in Bacula get the label/filename when they are used for the
+ first time. If you use recycling and custom label format like above,
+ the disk volume name doesn't match the contents after it has been
+ recycled. This feature makes it possible to keep the label/filename
+ in sync with the content and thus makes it easy to check/monitor the
+ backups from the shell and/or normal file management tools, because
+ the filenames of the disk volumes match the content.
Notes: The configuration option could be "Relabel after Recycling = Yes".
+
+========= New items after last vote ====================
+
+
+Note to renumber items use:
+scripts/renumber_projects.pl projects >1
+
+
========= Add new items above this line =================
========== Items put on hold by Kern ============================
+
+
+========== Items completed in version 5.0.0 ====================
+*Item : 'restore' menu: enter a JobId, automatically select dependents
+*Item : Deletion of disk Volumes when pruned (partial -- truncate when pruned)
+*Item : Implement Base jobs
+*Item : Restore from volumes on multiple storage daemons
+*Item : Enable/disable compression depending on storage device (disk/tape)
+*Item : Cause daemons to use a specific IP address to source communications
+*Item : "Maximum Concurrent Jobs" for drives when used with changer device
+*Item : List InChanger flag when doing restore.
+*Item : Port bat to Win32
+*Item : An option to operate on all pools with update vol parameters
+========== Item completed after 5.0.0 ==========================
+*Item : Add ability to Verify any specified Job.
projects / bacula / bacula / blobdiff