Support for Bacula
Please keep in mind that we are not getting paid for this. Nevertheless, our desire is to see as many people using Bacula as possible. So we are very willing to provide a reasonable level of email support.

Before asking for help, it could be useful to check against the email archive as often solution to your problem has been discussed or a patch has been released. Please see: http://news.gmane.org/search.php?match=bacula.

For support, send an email to bacula-users at lists.sourceforge.net, and if you are specific enough, some kind Bacula user will help you. The previous address was modified to prevent easy use by spammers. To use it, you must replace the at with an @ symbol. Due to the increasing volumes of spam on the list, you must be subscribed to it to be able to send and email to it. The link to your left entitled Email Lists provides links to where you can subscribe to each of the Bacula email lists. The users constantly monitor this list and will generally provide support. Please see Information Needed below for what to include in your support request. If you don't supply the necessary information, it will take longer to respond to your request, and users may be afraid to try to respond, if your request is too complicated or not well formulated.

I (Kern) get a number of "off-list" emails sent directly to me. Unfortunately, I am no longer able to provide direct user support. However, I do read all the email sent and occasionally provide a tip or two. If you do send email to me, please always copy the appropriate list, if you do not copy the list, I may not answer you, or I will answer by copying the list. If you really have something confidential, please clearly indicate it.

If you are looking for live-support you might check out our irc-channel in the Freenode net, called #bacula.

Information Needed

For us to respond to a bug report, we normally need the following as the minimum information, which you can enter into the appropriate fields of the bug reporting system:
  • Your operating system
  • The version of Bacula you are using
  • A clear and concise description of the problem
  • If you say "it crashes", "it doesn't work" or something similar, you should include some output from Bacula that shows this.
If you are having tape problems, please include:
  • The kind of tape drive you have
  • Have you run the btape "test" command?
If you are having database problems, please include:
  • The database you are using: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, SQLite3
  • The version of the database you are using
The first two of these items can be fulfilled by sending us a copy of your config.out file, which is in the main Bacula source directory after you have done your ./configure.

In addition, we will sometimes need a copy of your Bacula configuration files (especially bacula-dir.conf). If you think it is a configuration problem, please don't hesitate to send them if necessary.
Please read that little Bug-Report-HowTo as well.