+++ /dev/null
-
-Projects:
- Bacula Projects Roadmap
- Status updated 04 February 2009
-
-Items Completed for version 3.0.0:
-Item 1: Accurate restoration of renamed/deleted files
-Item 3: Merge multiple backups (Synthetic Backup or Consolidation)
-Item 4: Implement Catalog directive for Pool resource in Director
-Item 5: Add an item to the restore option where you can select a Pool
-Item 8: Implement Copy pools
-Item 12: Add Plug-ins to the FileSet Include statements.
-Item 13: Restore only file attributes (permissions, ACL, owner, group...)
-Item 18: Better control over Job execution
-Item 26: Store and restore extended attributes, especially selinux file contexts
-Item 27: make changing "spooldata=yes|no" possible for
-Item 28: Implement an option to modify the last written date for volumes
-
-Summary:
-Item 2: Allow FD to initiate a backup
-Item 6: Deletion of disk Volumes when pruned
-Item 7: Implement Base jobs
-Item 9: Scheduling syntax that permits more flexibility and options
-Item 10: Message mailing based on backup types
-Item 11: Cause daemons to use a specific IP address to source communications
-Item 14: Add an override in Schedule for Pools based on backup types
-Item 15: Implement more Python events and functions --- Abandoned for plugins
-Item 16: Allow inclusion/exclusion of files in a fileset by creation/mod times
-Item 17: Automatic promotion of backup levels based on backup size
-Item 19: Automatic disabling of devices
-Item 20: An option to operate on all pools with update vol parameters
-Item 21: Include timestamp of job launch in "stat clients" output
-Item 22: Implement Storage daemon compression
-Item 23: Improve Bacula's tape and drive usage and cleaning management
-Item 24: Multiple threads in file daemon for the same job
-Item 25: Archival (removal) of User Files to Tape
-
-
-Item 1: Accurate restoration of renamed/deleted files
- Date: 28 November 2005
- Origin: Martin Simmons (martin at lispworks dot com)
- Status: Done
-
- What: When restoring a fileset for a specified date (including "most
- recent"), Bacula should give you exactly the files and directories
- that existed at the time of the last backup prior to that date.
-
- Currently this only works if the last backup was a Full backup.
- When the last backup was Incremental/Differential, files and
- directories that have been renamed or deleted since the last Full
- backup are not currently restored correctly. Ditto for files with
- extra/fewer hard links than at the time of the last Full backup.
-
- Why: Incremental/Differential would be much more useful if this worked.
-
- Notes: Merging of multiple backups into a single one seems to
- rely on this working, otherwise the merged backups will not be
- truly equivalent to a Full backup.
-
- Note: Kern: notes shortened. This can be done without the need for
- inodes. It is essentially the same as the current Verify job,
- but one additional database record must be written, which does
- not need any database change.
-
- Notes: Kern: see if we can correct restoration of directories if
- replace=ifnewer is set. Currently, if the directory does not
- exist, a "dummy" directory is created, then when all the files
- are updated, the dummy directory is newer so the real values
- are not updated.
-
-Item 2: 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 3: Merge multiple backups (Synthetic Backup or Consolidation)
- Origin: Marc Cousin and Eric Bollengier
- Date: 15 November 2005
- Status: Done
-
- What: A merged backup is a backup made without connecting to the Client.
- It would be a Merge of existing backups into a single backup.
- In effect, it is like a restore but to the backup medium.
-
- For instance, say that last Sunday we made a full backup. Then
- all week long, we created incremental backups, in order to do
- them fast. Now comes Sunday again, and we need another full.
- The merged backup makes it possible to do instead an incremental
- backup (during the night for instance), and then create a merged
- backup during the day, by using the full and incrementals from
- the week. The merged backup will be exactly like a full made
- Sunday night on the tape, but the production interruption on the
- Client will be minimal, as the Client will only have to send
- incrementals.
-
- In fact, if it's done correctly, you could merge all the
- Incrementals into single Incremental, or all the Incrementals
- and the last Differential into a new Differential, or the Full,
- last differential and all the Incrementals into a new Full
- backup. And there is no need to involve the Client.
-
- Why: The benefit is that :
- - the Client just does an incremental ;
- - the merged backup on tape is just as a single full backup,
- and can be restored very fast.
-
- This is also a way of reducing the backup data since the old
- data can then be pruned (or not) from the catalog, possibly
- allowing older volumes to be recycled
-
-Item 4: Implement Catalog directive for Pool resource in Director
- Origin: Alan Davis adavis@ruckus.com
- Date: 6 March 2007
- Status: Done, but not tested, and possibly not fully implemented.
-
- What: The current behavior is for the director to create all pools
- found in the configuration file in all catalogs. Add a
- Catalog directive to the Pool resource to specify which
- catalog to use for each pool definition.
-
- Why: This allows different catalogs to have different pool
- attributes and eliminates the side-effect of adding
- pools to catalogs that don't need/use them.
-
- Notes: Kern: I think this is relatively easy to do, and it is really
- a pre-requisite to a number of the Copy pool, ... projects
- that are listed here.
-
-Item 5: Add an item to the restore option where you can select a Pool
- Origin: kshatriyak at gmail dot com
- Date: 1/1/2006
- Status: Done at least via command line
-
- What: In the restore option (Select the most recent backup for a
- client) it would be useful to add an option where you can limit
- the selection to a certain pool.
-
- Why: When using cloned jobs, most of the time you have 2 pools - a
- disk pool and a tape pool. People who have 2 pools would like to
- select the most recent backup from disk, not from tape (tape
- would be only needed in emergency). However, the most recent
- backup (which may just differ a second from the disk backup) may
- be on tape and would be selected. The problem becomes bigger if
- you have a full and differential - the most "recent" full backup
- may be on disk, while the most recent differential may be on tape
- (though the differential on disk may differ even only a second or
- so). Bacula will complain that the backups reside on different
- media then. For now the only solution now when restoring things
- when you have 2 pools is to manually search for the right
- job-id's and enter them by hand, which is a bit fault tolerant.
-
- Notes: Kern: This is a nice idea. It could also be the way to support
- Jobs that have been Copied (similar to migration, but not yet
- implemented).
-
-
-
-Item 6: Deletion of disk Volumes when pruned
- Date: Nov 25, 2005
- Origin: Ross Boylan <RossBoylan at stanfordalumni dot org> (edited
- by Kern)
- Status:
-
- 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.
-
- Why: This would allow users more control over their Volumes and
- prevent disk based volumes from consuming too much space.
-
- 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.
-
-Item 7: Implement Base jobs
- Date: 28 October 2005
- Origin: Kern
- 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 8: Implement Copy pools
- Date: 27 November 2005
- Origin: David Boyes (dboyes at sinenomine dot net)
- Status: A trivial version of this is done.
-
- What: I would like Bacula to have the capability to write copies
- of backed-up data on multiple physical volumes selected
- from different pools without transferring the data
- multiple times, and to accept any of the copy volumes
- as valid for restore.
-
- Why: In many cases, businesses are required to keep offsite
- copies of backup volumes, or just wish for simple
- protection against a human operator dropping a storage
- volume and damaging it. The ability to generate multiple
- volumes in the course of a single backup job allows
- customers to simple check out one copy and send it
- offsite, marking it as out of changer or otherwise
- unavailable. Currently, the library and magazine
- management capability in Bacula does not make this process
- simple.
-
- Restores would use the copy of the data on the first
- available volume, in order of Copy pool chain definition.
-
- This is also a major scalability issue -- as the number of
- clients increases beyond several thousand, and the volume
- of data increases, transferring the data multiple times to
- produce additional copies of the backups will become
- physically impossible due to transfer speed
- issues. Generating multiple copies at server side will
- become the only practical option.
-
- How: I suspect that this will require adding a multiplexing
- SD that appears to be a SD to a specific FD, but 1-n FDs
- to the specific back end SDs managing the primary and copy
- pools. Storage pools will also need to acquire parameters
- to define the pools to be used for copies.
-
- Notes: I would commit some of my developers' time if we can agree
- on the design and behavior.
-
- Notes: Additional notes from David:
- I think there's two areas where new configuration would be needed.
-
- 1) Identify a "SD mux" SD (specify it in the config just like a
- normal SD. The SD configuration would need something like a
- "Daemon Type = Normal/Mux" keyword to identify it as a
- multiplexor. (The director code would need modification to add
- the ability to do the multiple session setup, but the impact of
- the change would be new code that was invoked only when a SDmux is
- needed).
-
- 2) Additional keywords in the Pool definition to identify the need
- to create copies. Each pool would acquire a Copypool= attribute
- (may be repeated to generate more than one copy. 3 is about the
- practical limit, but no point in hardcoding that).
-
- Example:
- Pool {
- Name = Primary
- Pool Type = Backup
- Copypool = Copy1
- Copypool = OffsiteCopy2
- }
-
- where Copy1 and OffsiteCopy2 are valid pools.
-
- In terms of function (shorthand): Backup job X is defined
- normally, specifying pool Primary as the pool to use. Job gets
- scheduled, and Bacula starts scheduling resources. Scheduler
- looks at pool definition for Primary, sees that there are a
- non-zero number of copypool keywords. The director then connects
- to an available SDmux, passes it the pool ids for Primary, Copy1,
- and OffsiteCopy2 and waits. SDmux then goes out and reserves
- devices and volumes in the normal SDs that serve Primary, Copy1
- and OffsiteCopy2. When all are ready, the SDmux signals ready
- back to the director, and the FD is given the address of the SDmux
- as the SD to communicate with. Backup proceeds normally, with the
- SDmux duplicating blocks to each connected normal SD, and
- returning ready when all defined copies have been written. At
- EOJ, FD shuts down connection with SDmux, which closes down the
- normal SD connections and goes back to an idle state. SDmux does
- not update database; normal SDs do (noting that file is present on
- each volume it has been written to).
-
- On restore, director looks for the volume containing the file in
- pool Primary first, then Copy1, then OffsiteCopy2. If the volume
- holding the file in pool Primary is missing or busy (being written
- in another job, etc), or one of the volumes from the copypool list
- that have the file in question is already mounted and ready for
- some reason, use it to do the restore, else mount one of the
- copypool volumes and proceed.
-
-
-Item 9: 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>
- Status:
-
- What: Currently, Bacula only understands how to deal with weeks of the
- month or weeks of the year in schedules. This makes it impossible
- to do a true weekly rotation of tapes. There will always be a
- discontinuity that will require disruptive manual intervention at
- least monthly or yearly because week boundaries never align with
- month or year boundaries.
-
- A solution would be to add a new syntax that defines (at least)
- a start timestamp, and repetition period.
-
- An easy option to skip a certain job on a certain date.
-
-
- Why: Rotated backups done at weekly intervals are useful, and Bacula
- cannot currently do them without extensive hacking.
-
- You could then easily skip tape backups on holidays. Especially
- if you got no autochanger and can only fit one backup on a tape
- that would be really handy, other jobs could proceed normally
- and you won't get errors that way.
-
-
- Notes: Here is an example syntax showing a 3-week rotation where full
- Backups would be performed every week on Saturday, and an
- incremental would be performed every week on Tuesday. Each
- set of tapes could be removed from the loader for the following
- two cycles before coming back and being reused on the third
- week. Since the execution times are determined by intervals
- from a given point in time, there will never be any issues with
- having to adjust to any sort of arbitrary time boundary. In
- the example provided, I even define the starting schedule
- as crossing both a year and a month boundary, but the run times
- would be based on the "Repeat" value and would therefore happen
- weekly as desired.
-
-
- Schedule {
- Name = "Week 1 Rotation"
- #Saturday. Would run Dec 30, Jan 20, Feb 10, etc.
- Run {
- Options {
- Type = Full
- Start = 2006-12-30 01:00
- Repeat = 3w
- }
- }
- #Tuesday. Would run Jan 2, Jan 23, Feb 13, etc.
- Run {
- Options {
- Type = Incremental
- Start = 2007-01-02 01:00
- Repeat = 3w
- }
- }
- }
-
- Schedule {
- Name = "Week 2 Rotation"
- #Saturday. Would run Jan 6, Jan 27, Feb 17, etc.
- Run {
- Options {
- Type = Full
- Start = 2007-01-06 01:00
- Repeat = 3w
- }
- }
- #Tuesday. Would run Jan 9, Jan 30, Feb 20, etc.
- Run {
- Options {
- Type = Incremental
- Start = 2007-01-09 01:00
- Repeat = 3w
- }
- }
- }
-
- Schedule {
- Name = "Week 3 Rotation"
- #Saturday. Would run Jan 13, Feb 3, Feb 24, etc.
- Run {
- Options {
- Type = Full
- Start = 2007-01-13 01:00
- Repeat = 3w
- }
- }
- #Tuesday. Would run Jan 16, Feb 6, Feb 27, etc.
- Run {
- Options {
- Type = Incremental
- Start = 2007-01-16 01:00
- Repeat = 3w
- }
- }
- }
-
- Notes: Kern: I have merged the previously separate project of skipping
- jobs (via Schedule syntax) into this.
-
-
-Item 10: Message mailing based on backup types
- Origin: Evan Kaufman <evan.kaufman@gmail.com>
- Date: January 6, 2006
- Status:
-
- What: In the "Messages" resource definitions, allowing messages
- to be mailed based on the type (backup, restore, etc.) and level
- (full, differential, etc) of job that created the originating
- message(s).
-
- Why: It would, for example, allow someone's boss to be emailed
- automatically only when a Full Backup job runs, so he can
- retrieve the tapes for offsite storage, even if the IT dept.
- doesn't (or can't) explicitly notify him. At the same time, his
- mailbox wouldnt be filled by notifications of Verifies, Restores,
- or Incremental/Differential Backups (which would likely be kept
- onsite).
-
- Notes: One way this could be done is through additional message types, for example:
-
- Messages {
- # email the boss only on full system backups
- Mail = boss@mycompany.com = full, !incremental, !differential, !restore,
- !verify, !admin
- # email us only when something breaks
- MailOnError = itdept@mycompany.com = all
- }
-
- Notes: Kern: This should be rather trivial to implement.
-
-
-Item 11: 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 12: Add Plug-ins to the FileSet Include statements.
- Date: 28 October 2005
- Origin: Kern
- Status: Partially coded in 1.37 -- much more to do.
-
- What: Allow users to specify wild-card and/or regular
- expressions to be matched in both the Include and
- Exclude directives in a FileSet. At the same time,
- allow users to define plug-ins to be called (based on
- regular expression/wild-card matching).
-
- Why: This would give the users the ultimate ability to control
- how files are backed up/restored. A user could write a
- plug-in knows how to backup his Oracle database without
- stopping/starting it, for example.
-
-
-Item 13: Restore only file attributes (permissions, ACL, owner, group...)
- Origin: Eric Bollengier
- Date: 30/12/2006
- Status: Implemented by Eric, see project-restore-attributes-only.patch
-
- What: The goal of this project is to be able to restore only rights
- and attributes of files without crushing them.
-
- Why: Who have never had to repair a chmod -R 777, or a wild update
- of recursive right under Windows? At this time, you must have
- enough space to restore data, dump attributes (easy with acl,
- more complex with unix/windows rights) and apply them to your
- broken tree. With this options, it will be very easy to compare
- right or ACL over the time.
-
- Notes: If the file is here, we skip restore and we change rights.
- If the file isn't here, we can create an empty one and apply
- rights or do nothing.
-
- This will not work with win32 stream, because it seems that we
- can't split the WriteBackup stream to get only ACL and ownerchip.
-
-Item 14: Add an override in Schedule for Pools based on backup types
-Date: 19 Jan 2005
-Origin: Chad Slater <chad.slater@clickfox.com>
-Status:
-
- What: Adding a FullStorage=BigTapeLibrary in the Schedule resource
- would help those of us who use different storage devices for different
- backup levels cope with the "auto-upgrade" of a backup.
-
- Why: Assume I add several new devices to be backed up, i.e. several
- hosts with 1TB RAID. To avoid tape switching hassles, incrementals are
- stored in a disk set on a 2TB RAID. If you add these devices in the
- middle of the month, the incrementals are upgraded to "full" backups,
- but they try to use the same storage device as requested in the
- incremental job, filling up the RAID holding the differentials. If we
- could override the Storage parameter for full and/or differential
- backups, then the Full job would use the proper Storage device, which
- has more capacity (i.e. a 8TB tape library.
-
-
-Item 15: Implement more Python events and functions
- Date: 28 October 2005
- Origin: Kern
- Status: Project abandoned in favor of plugins.
-
- What: Allow Python scripts to be called at more places
- within Bacula and provide additional access to Bacula
- internal variables.
-
- Implement an interface for Python scripts to access the
- catalog through Bacula.
-
- Why: This will permit users to customize Bacula through
- Python scripts.
-
- Notes: Recycle event
- Scratch pool event
- NeedVolume event
- MediaFull event
-
- Also add a way to get a listing of currently running
- jobs (possibly also scheduled jobs).
-
-
- to start the appropriate job.
-
-
-Item 16: Allow inclusion/exclusion of files in a fileset by creation/mod times
- Origin: Evan Kaufman <evan.kaufman@gmail.com>
- Date: January 11, 2006
- Status:
-
- What: In the vein of the Wild and Regex directives in a Fileset's
- Options, it would be helpful to allow a user to include or exclude
- files and directories by creation or modification times.
-
- You could factor the Exclude=yes|no option in much the same way it
- affects the Wild and Regex directives. For example, you could exclude
- all files modified before a certain date:
-
- Options {
- Exclude = yes
- Modified Before = ####
- }
-
- Or you could exclude all files created/modified since a certain date:
-
- Options {
- Exclude = yes
- Created Modified Since = ####
- }
-
- The format of the time/date could be done several ways, say the number
- of seconds since the epoch:
- 1137008553 = Jan 11 2006, 1:42:33PM # result of `date +%s`
-
- Or a human readable date in a cryptic form:
- 20060111134233 = Jan 11 2006, 1:42:33PM # YYYYMMDDhhmmss
-
- Why: I imagine a feature like this could have many uses. It would
- allow a user to do a full backup while excluding the base operating
- system files, so if I installed a Linux snapshot from a CD yesterday,
- I'll *exclude* all files modified *before* today. If I need to
- recover the system, I use the CD I already have, plus the tape backup.
- Or if, say, a Windows client is hit by a particularly corrosive
- virus, and I need to *exclude* any files created/modified *since* the
- time of infection.
-
- Notes: Of course, this feature would work in concert with other
- in/exclude rules, and wouldnt override them (or each other).
-
- Notes: The directives I'd imagine would be along the lines of
- "[Created] [Modified] [Before|Since] = <date>".
- So one could compare against 'ctime' and/or 'mtime', but ONLY 'before'
- or 'since'.
-
-
-Item 17: Automatic promotion of backup levels based on backup size
- Date: 19 January 2006
- Origin: Adam Thornton <athornton@sinenomine.net>
- Status:
-
- What: Amanda has a feature whereby it estimates the space that a
- differential, incremental, and full backup would take. If the
- difference in space required between the scheduled level and the next
- level up is beneath some user-defined critical threshold, the backup
- level is bumped to the next type. Doing this minimizes the number of
- volumes necessary during a restore, with a fairly minimal cost in
- backup media space.
-
- Why: I know at least one (quite sophisticated and smart) user
- for whom the absence of this feature is a deal-breaker in terms of
- using Bacula; if we had it it would eliminate the one cool thing
- Amanda can do and we can't (at least, the one cool thing I know of).
-
-
-Item 18: Better control over Job execution
- Date: 18 August 2007
- Origin: Kern
- Status:
-
- What: Bacula needs a few extra features for better Job execution:
- 1. A way to prevent multiple Jobs of the same name from
- being scheduled at the same time (ususally happens when
- a job is missed because a client is down).
- 2. Directives that permit easier upgrading of Job types
- based on a period of time. I.e. "do a Full at least
- once every 2 weeks", or "do a differential at least
- once a week". If a lower level job is scheduled when
- it begins to run it will be upgraded depending on
- the specified criteria.
-
- Why: Obvious.
-
-
-Item 19: Automatic disabling of devices
- Date: 2005-11-11
- Origin: Peter Eriksson <peter at ifm.liu dot se>
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
- 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.
-
-Item 20: 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
-
- 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.
-
- Why: I have many pools and therefore unhappy with manually
- updating each of them using update -> Volume parameters -> All
- Volumes from Pool -> pool #.
-
-
-Item 21: 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:
-
- What: The "stat clients" command doesn't include any detail on when
- the active backup jobs were launched.
-
- Why: Including the timestamp would make it much easier to decide whether
- a job is running properly.
-
- 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.
-
-
-
-Item 22: 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:
-
-Item 23: 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: 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 24: Multiple threads in file daemon for the same job
- Date: 27 November 2005
- Origin: Ove Risberg (Ove.Risberg at octocode dot com)
- Status:
-
- What: I want the file daemon to start multiple threads for a backup
- job so the fastest possible backup can be made.
-
- 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 25: Archival (removal) of User Files to Tape
- Date: Nov. 24/2005
- Origin: Ray Pengelly [ray at biomed dot queensu dot ca
- Status:
-
- What: The ability to archive data to storage based on certain parameters
- such as age, size, or location. Once the data has been written to
- storage and logged it is then pruned from the originating
- filesystem. Note! We are talking about user's files and not
- Bacula Volumes.
-
- Why: This would allow fully automatic storage management which becomes
- useful for large datastores. It would also allow for auto-staging
- from one media type to another.
-
- Example 1) Medical imaging needs to store large amounts of data.
- They decide to keep data on their servers for 6 months and then put
- it away for long term storage. The server then finds all files
- older than 6 months writes them to tape. The files are then removed
- from the server.
-
- Example 2) All data that hasn't been accessed in 2 months could be
- moved from high-cost, fibre-channel disk storage to a low-cost
- large-capacity SATA disk storage pool which doesn't have as quick of
- access time. Then after another 6 months (or possibly as one
- storage pool gets full) data is migrated to Tape.
-
-
-Item 26: Store and restore extended attributes, especially selinux file contexts
- Date: 28 December 2007
- Origin: Frank Sweetser <fs@wpi.edu>
- Status: Done
- What: The ability to store and restore extended attributes on
- filesystems that support them, such as ext3.
-
- Why: Security Enhanced Linux (SELinux) enabled systems make extensive
- use of extended attributes. In addition to the standard user,
- group, and permission, each file has an associated SELinux context
- stored as an extended attribute. This context is used to define
- which operations a given program is permitted to perform on that
- file. Storing contexts on an SELinux system is as critical as
- storing ownership and permissions. In the case of a full system
- restore, the system will not even be able to boot until all
- critical system files have been properly relabeled.
-
- Notes: Fedora ships with a version of tar that has been patched to handle
- extended attributes. The patch has not been integrated upstream
- yet, so could serve as a good starting point.
-
- http://linux.die.net/man/2/getxattr
- http://linux.die.net/man/2/setxattr
- http://linux.die.net/man/2/listxattr
- ===
- http://linux.die.net/man/3/getfilecon
- http://linux.die.net/man/3/setfilecon
-
-Item 27: make changing "spooldata=yes|no" possible for
- manual/interactive jobs
- Origin: Marc Schiffbauer <marc@schiffbauer.net>
- Date: 12 April 2007)
- Status: Done
-
- What: Make it possible to modify the spooldata option
- for a job when being run from within the console.
- Currently it is possible to modify the backup level
- and the spooldata setting in a Schedule resource.
- It is also possible to modify the backup level when using
- the "run" command in the console.
- But it is currently not possible to to the same
- with "spooldata=yes|no" like:
-
- run job=MyJob level=incremental spooldata=yes
-
- Why: In some situations it would be handy to be able to switch
- spooldata on or off for interactive/manual jobs based on
- which data the admin expects or how fast the LAN/WAN
- connection currently is.
-
- Notes: ./.
-
-Item 28: Implement an option to modify the last written date for volumes
-Date: 16 September 2008
-Origin: Franck (xeoslaenor at gmail dot com)
-Status: Done
-What: The ability to modify the last written date for a volume
-Why: It's sometime necessary to jump a volume when you have a pool of volume
- which recycles the oldest volume at each backup.
- Sometime, it needs to cancel a set of backup (one day
- backup, completely) and we want to avoid that bacula
- choose the volume (which is not written at all) from
- the cancelled backup (It has to jump to next volume).
- in this case, we just need to update the written date
- manually to avoir the "oldest volume" purge.
-Notes: An option can be add to "update volume" command (like 'written date'
- choice for example)
-
-
-========= New Items since the last vote =================
-
-Item 26: Add a new directive to bacula-dir.conf which permits inclusion of all subconfiguration files in a given 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
-
-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.
-
- Item n: List inChanger flag when doing restore.
- Origin: Jesper Krogh<jesper@krogh.cc>
- Date: 17 oct. 2008
- Status:
-
- 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
-
- 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.
-
-
- Why: This would help getting large restores through minimizing the
- time spent waiting for operator to drop by and change tapes in the library.
-
- 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.
-
-
-Item 1: 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.
-
- 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 1: enable/disable compression depending on storage device (disk/tape)
- Origin: Ralf Gross ralf-lists@ralfgross.de
- Date: 2008-01-11
- Status: Initial Request
-
- 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: 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.
-
-
- 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 1: Backup and Restore of Windows Encrypted Files through raw encryption
- functions
-
- Origin: Michael Mohr, SAG Mohr.External@infineon.com
-
- Date: 22 February 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.
-
- 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: ./.
-
- Item 1: 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
-
- Date: 20 March 2008
-
- Origin: Frank Sweetser <fs@wpi.edu>
-
- What: Add a new SD directive, "minimum spool size" (or similar). This
- directive would specify a minimum level of free space available for
- spooling. If the unused spool space is less than this level, any
- new spooling requests would be blocked as if the "maximum spool
- size" threshold had bee reached. Already spooling jobs would be
- unaffected by this directive.
-
- Why: I've been bitten by this scenario a couple of times:
-
- Assume a maximum spool size of 100M. Two concurrent jobs, A and B,
- are both running. Due to timing quirks and previously running jobs,
- job A has used 99.9M of space in the spool directory. While A is
- busy despooling to disk, B is happily using the remaining 0.1M of
- spool space. This ends up in a spool/despool sequence every 0.1M of
- data. In addition to fragmenting the data on the volume far more
- than was necessary, in larger data sets (ie, tens or hundreds of
- gigabytes) it can easily produce multi-megabyte report emails!
-
- Item n?: Expand the Verify Job capability to verify Jobs older than the
- last one. For VolumeToCatalog Jobs
- Date: 17 Januar 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 X: Add EFS support on Windows
- Origin: Alex Ehrlich (Alex.Ehrlich-at-mail.ee)
- Date: 05 August 2008
- Status:
-
- What: 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: Many laptop users utilize the EFS functionality today; so do.
- some non-laptop ones, too.
- Currently files encrypted by means of EFS cannot be backed up.
- It means a Windows boutique cannot rely on Bacula as its
- backup solution, at least when using Windows 2K, XPP,
- "better" Vista etc on workstations, unless EFS is
- forbidden by policies.
- The current situation might result into "false sense of
- security" among the end-users.
-
- 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.
-
- encrypted-file-related callback functions.
-========== Already implemented ================================
-
-
-============= Empty Feature Request form ===========
-Item n: One line summary ...
- Date: Date submitted
- Origin: Name and email of originator.
- Status:
-
- What: More detailed explanation ...
-
- Why: Why it is important ...
-
- Notes: Additional notes or features (omit if not used)
-============== End Feature Request form ==============
-
-========== Items on put hold by Kern ============================
-
-Item h1: Split documentation
- Origin: Maxx <maxxatworkat gmail dot com>
- Date: 27th July 2006
- Status: Approved, awaiting implementation
-
- What: Split documentation in several books
-
- Why: Bacula manual has now more than 600 pages, and looking for
- implementation details is getting complicated. I think
- it would be good to split the single volume in two or
- maybe three parts:
-
- 1) Introduction, requirements and tutorial, typically
- are useful only until first installation time
-
- 2) Basic installation and configuration, with all the
- gory details about the directives supported 3)
- Advanced Bacula: testing, troubleshooting, GUI and
- ancillary programs, security managements, scripting,
- etc.
-
- Notes: This is a project that needs to be done, and will be implemented,
- but it is really a developer issue of timing, and does not
- needed to be included in the voting.
-
-
-Item h2: Implement support for stacking arbitrary stream filters, sinks.
-Date: 23 November 2006
-Origin: Landon Fuller <landonf@threerings.net>
-Status: Planning. Assigned to landonf.
-
- What: Implement support for the following:
- - Stacking arbitrary stream filters (eg, encryption, compression,
- sparse data handling))
- - Attaching file sinks to terminate stream filters (ie, write out
- the resultant data to a file)
- - Refactor the restoration state machine accordingly
-
- Why: The existing stream implementation suffers from the following: - All
- state (compression, encryption, stream restoration), is
- global across the entire restore process, for all streams. There are
- multiple entry and exit points in the restoration state machine, and
- thus multiple places where state must be allocated, deallocated,
- initialized, or reinitialized. This results in exceptional complexity
- for the author of a stream filter.
- - The developer must enumerate all possible combinations of filters
- and stream types (ie, win32 data with encryption, without encryption,
- with encryption AND compression, etc).
-
- Notes: This feature request only covers implementing the stream filters/
- sinks, and refactoring the file daemon's restoration
- implementation accordingly. If I have extra time, I will also
- rewrite the backup implementation. My intent in implementing the
- restoration first is to solve pressing bugs in the restoration
- handling, and to ensure that the new restore implementation
- handles existing backups correctly.
-
- I do not plan on changing the network or tape data structures to
- support defining arbitrary stream filters, but supporting that
- functionality is the ultimate goal.
-
- Assistance with either code or testing would be fantastic.
-
- Notes: Kern: this project has a lot of merit, and we need to do it, but
- it is really an issue for developers rather than a new feature
- for users, so I have removed it from the voting list, but kept it
- here, but at some point, it will be implemented.
-
-Item h3: Filesystem watch triggered backup.
- Date: 31 August 2006
- Origin: Jesper Krogh <jesper@krogh.cc>
- Status:
-
- What: With inotify and similar filesystem triggeret notification
- systems is it possible to have the file-daemon to monitor
- filesystem changes and initiate backup.
-
- Why: There are 2 situations where this is nice to have.
- 1) It is possible to get a much finer-grained backup than
- the fixed schedules used now.. A file created and deleted
- a few hours later, can automatically be caught.
-
- 2) The introduced load on the system will probably be
- distributed more even on the system.
-
- Notes: This can be combined with configration that specifies
- something like: "at most every 15 minutes or when changes
- consumed XX MB".
-
-Kern Notes: I would rather see this implemented by an external program
- that monitors the Filesystem changes, then uses the console
-
-
-Item h4: Directive/mode to backup only file changes, not entire file
- Date: 11 November 2005
- Origin: Joshua Kugler <joshua dot kugler at uaf dot edu>
- Marek Bajon <mbajon at bimsplus dot com dot pl>
- Status:
-
- What: Currently when a file changes, the entire file will be backed up in
- the next incremental or full backup. To save space on the tapes
- it would be nice to have a mode whereby only the changes to the
- file would be backed up when it is changed.
-
- Why: This would save lots of space when backing up large files such as
- logs, mbox files, Outlook PST files and the like.
-
- Notes: This would require the usage of disk-based volumes as comparing
- files would not be feasible using a tape drive.
-
- Notes: Kern: I don't know how to implement this. Put on hold until someone
- provides a detailed implementation plan.
-
-
-Item h5: Implement multiple numeric backup levels as supported by dump
-Date: 3 April 2006
-Origin: Daniel Rich <drich@employees.org>
-Status:
-What: Dump allows specification of backup levels numerically instead of just
- "full", "incr", and "diff". In this system, at any given level,
- all files are backed up that were were modified since the last
- backup of a higher level (with 0 being the highest and 9 being the
- lowest). A level 0 is therefore equivalent to a full, level 9 an
- incremental, and the levels 1 through 8 are varying levels of
- differentials. For bacula's sake, these could be represented as
- "full", "incr", and "diff1", "diff2", etc.
-
-Why: Support of multiple backup levels would provide for more advanced
- backup rotation schemes such as "Towers of Hanoi". This would
- allow better flexibility in performing backups, and can lead to
- shorter recover times.
-
-Notes: Legato Networker supports a similar system with full, incr, and 1-9 as
- levels.
-
-Notes: Kern: I don't see the utility of this, and it would be a *huge*
- modification to existing code.
-
-Item h6: Implement NDMP protocol support
- Origin: Alan Davis
- Date: 06 March 2007
- Status:
-
- What: Network Data Management Protocol is implemented by a number of
- NAS filer vendors to enable backups using third-party
- software.
-
- Why: This would allow NAS filer backups in Bacula without incurring
- the overhead of NFS or SBM/CIFS.
-
- Notes: Further information is available:
- http://www.ndmp.org
- http://www.ndmp.org/wp/wp.shtml
- http://www.traakan.com/ndmjob/index.html
-
- There are currently no viable open-source NDMP
- implementations. There is a reference SDK and example
- app available from ndmp.org but it has problems
- compiling on recent Linux and Solaris OS'. The ndmjob
- reference implementation from Traakan is known to
- compile on Solaris 10.
-
- Notes: Kern: I am not at all in favor of this until NDMP becomes
- an Open Standard or until there are Open Source libraries
- that interface to it.
-
-Item h7: Commercial database support
- Origin: Russell Howe <russell_howe dot wreckage dot org>
- Date: 26 July 2006
- Status:
-
- What: It would be nice for the database backend to support more databases.
- I'm thinking of SQL Server at the moment, but I guess Oracle, DB2,
- MaxDB, etc are all candidates. SQL Server would presumably be
- implemented using FreeTDS or maybe an ODBC library?
-
- Why: We only really have one database server, which is MS SQL Server 2000.
- Maintaining a second one for the backup software (we grew out of
- SQLite, which I liked, but which didn't work so well with our
- database size). We don't really have a machine with the resources
- to run postgres, and would rather only maintain a single DBMS.
- We're stuck with SQL Server because pretty much all the company's
- custom applications (written by consultants) are locked into SQL
- Server 2000. I can imagine this scenario is fairly common, and it
- would be nice to use the existing properly specced database server
- for storing Bacula's catalog, rather than having to run a second
- DBMS.
-
- Notes: This might be nice, but someone other than me will probably need to
- implement it, and at the moment, proprietary code cannot legally
- be mixed with Bacula GPLed code. This would be possible only
- providing the vendors provide GPLed (or OpenSource) interface
- code.
-
-Item h8: Incorporation of XACML2/SAML2 parsing
- Date: 19 January 2006
- Origin: Adam Thornton <athornton@sinenomine.net>
- Status: Blue sky
-
- What: XACML is "eXtensible Access Control Markup Language" and "SAML is
- the "Security Assertion Markup Language"--an XML standard for
- making statements about identity and authorization. Having these
- would give us a framework to approach ACLs in a generic manner,
- and in a way flexible enough to support the four major sorts of
- ACLs I see as a concern to Bacula at this point, as well as
- (probably) to deal with new sorts of ACLs that may appear in the
- future.
-
- Why: Bacula is beginning to need to back up systems with ACLs that do not
- map cleanly onto traditional Unix permissions. I see four sets of
- ACLs--in general, mutually incompatible with one another--that
- we're going to need to deal with. These are: NTFS ACLs, POSIX
- ACLs, NFSv4 ACLS, and AFS ACLS. (Some may question the relevance
- of AFS; AFS is one of Sine Nomine's core consulting businesses,
- and having a reputable file-level backup and restore technology
- for it (as Tivoli is probably going to drop AFS support soon since
- IBM no longer supports AFS) would be of huge benefit to our
- customers; we'd most likely create the AFS support at Sine Nomine
- for inclusion into the Bacula (and perhaps some changes to the
- OpenAFS volserver) core code.)
-
- Now, obviously, Bacula already handles NTFS just fine. However, I
- think there's a lot of value in implementing a generic ACL model,
- so that it's easy to support whatever particular instances of ACLs
- come down the pike: POSIX ACLS (think SELinux) and NFSv4 are the
- obvious things arriving in the Linux world in a big way in the
- near future. XACML, although overcomplicated for our needs,
- provides this framework, and we should be able to leverage other
- people's implementations to minimize the amount of work *we* have
- to do to get a generic ACL framework. Basically, the costs of
- implementation are high, but they're largely both external to
- Bacula and already sunk.
-
- Notes: As you indicate this is a bit of "blue sky" or in other words,
- at the moment, it is a bit esoteric to consider for Bacula.
-
-Item h9: Archive data
- Date: 15/5/2006
- Origin: calvin streeting calvin at absentdream dot com
- Status:
-
- What: The abilty to archive to media (dvd/cd) in a uncompressed format
- for dead filing (archiving not backing up)
-
- Why: At work when jobs are finished and moved off of the main
- file servers (raid based systems) onto a simple Linux
- file server (ide based system) so users can find old
- information without contacting the IT dept.
-
- So this data dosn't realy change it only gets added to,
- But it also needs backing up. At the moment it takes
- about 8 hours to back up our servers (working data) so
- rather than add more time to existing backups i am trying
- to implement a system where we backup the acrhive data to
- cd/dvd these disks would only need to be appended to
- (burn only new/changed files to new disks for off site
- storage). basialy understand the differnce between
- achive data and live data.
-
- Notes: Scan the data and email me when it needs burning divide
- into predefined chunks keep a recored of what is on what
- disk make me a label (simple php->mysql=>pdf stuff) i
- could do this bit ability to save data uncompresed so
- it can be read in any other system (future proof data)
- save the catalog with the disk as some kind of menu
- system
-
- Notes: Kern: I don't understand this item, and in any case, if it
- is specific to DVD/CDs, which we do not recommend using,
- it is unlikely to be implemented except as a user
- submitted patch.
-
-
-Item h10: Clustered file-daemons
- Origin: Alan Brown ajb2 at mssl dot ucl dot ac dot uk
- Date: 24 July 2006
- Status:
- What: A "virtual" filedaemon, which is actually a cluster of real ones.
-
- Why: In the case of clustered filesystems (SAN setups, GFS, or OCFS2, etc)
- multiple machines may have access to the same set of filesystems
-
- For performance reasons, one may wish to initate backups from
- several of these machines simultaneously, instead of just using
- one backup source for the common clustered filesystem.
-
- For obvious reasons, normally backups of $A-FD/$PATH and
- B-FD/$PATH are treated as different backup sets. In this case
- they are the same communal set.
-
- Likewise when restoring, it would be easier to just specify
- one of the cluster machines and let bacula decide which to use.
-
- This can be faked to some extent using DNS round robin entries
- and a virtual IP address, however it means "status client" will
- always give bogus answers. Additionally there is no way of
- spreading the load evenly among the servers.
-
- What is required is something similar to the storage daemon
- autochanger directives, so that Bacula can keep track of
- operating backups/restores and direct new jobs to a "free"
- client.
-
- Notes: Kern: I don't understand the request enough to be able to
- implement it. A lot more design detail should be presented
- before voting on this project.
-
- Feature Request Form
-
-Item n: 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.
-
-
-Item 1: "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 n: 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 1: 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 1: 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.
-
- 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
- are executing the intended query, that their local changes wouldn't
- conflict with future bacula upgrades.
-
- For scripting, it's very important that the intended query is
- what's actually executed. The current method of parsing the
- query.sql file discourages scripting because the addition or
- deletion of queries within the file will require corresponding
- changes to scripts. It may not be obvious to users that deleting
- query "17" in the query.sql file will require changing all
- references to higher numbered queries. Similarly, when new
- bacula distributions change the number of "official" queries,
- user-developed queries cannot simply be appended to the file
- without also changing any references to those queries in scripts
- or procedural documentation, etc.
-
- In addition, using fixed numbers for queries would encourage more
- user-initiated development of queries, by supporting conventions
- such as:
-
- queries numbered 1-50 are supported/developed/distributed by
- with official bacula releases
-
- queries numbered 100-200 are community contributed, and are
- related to media management
-
- queries numbered 201-300 are community contributed, and are
- related to checksums, finding duplicated files across
- different backups, etc.
-
- queries numbered 301-400 are community contributed, and are
- related to backup statistics (average file size, size per
- client per backup level, time for all clients by backup level,
- storage capacity by media type, etc.)
-
- queries numbered 500-999 are locally created
-
- Notes:
- Alternatively, queries could be called by keyword (tag), rather
- than by number.
-
-
-Item n: List inChanger flag when doing restore.
- Origin: Jesper Krogh<jesper@krogh.cc>
- Date: 17 oct. 2008
- Status:
-
- 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
-
-
-Item 26: Add a new directive to bacula-dir.conf which permits inclusion of all subconfiguration files in a given 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
-
-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:
-
- #
- # 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'"
-
- and when we get a new client, we just put its configuration into
- a new file called something like:
-
- /etc/bacula/clientdefs/clientname.conf
-
-
projects / bacula / bacula / commitdiff