Bill Arlofski's blog

A request was made on the Bacula mailing list for a way to get daily and weekly backup reports. This got me to thinking that such a daily email would be useful.

So, off I went to write a simple bash shell script to generate these reports.

Keep in mind that this is a pretty simple report and it works for our needs. You may wish to modify it to include HTML formatting, additional fields such as StartTime and EndTime, total GB for all jobs, etc.

20130418 - Script re-written to utilize bconsole's "sqlquery" command to increase efficiency

Thanks to Josh Fisher for vchanger, and for recently sharing a few scripts on the Bacula mailing list which allow you to easily enable or disable all volumes in a pool, or all volumes on a vchanger magazine.

Making sure that only currently available volumes are enabled in Bacula's database solves a few issues - especially when using multiple removable magazines with vchanger.

The following script may be run manually when you swap removable media, or as a RunScript in an "Admin" type Bacula job. It will automatically determine which vchanger magazine(s) are inserted and available and will use bconsole's sqlquery command to to set the "Enabled" field in the Bacula database for all available volumes accordingly.

Introduction:

Since backups are the most important process regardless of what industry you are in, it pays to put a lot of thought into creating a reliable, easy-to-use, scalable, and secure backup solution.

Why reliable?
This should be pretty obvious. Without a reliable backup solution that "just works" you can not be 100% sure that you will be able to restore any data at any time, and this clearly a bad thing. Files are lost or accidentally deleted by users and there is no excuse for not being able to restore this data.

Why easy-to-use?
If your backup process is not simple and painless for the end users (eg: the person or persons responsible for rotating the backup media) then sooner or later shortcuts will be taken, steps will be skipped, errors or warnings will be ignored, and you will not have the data you need when disaster strikes - and it will strike, it's just a matter of time.

Why Scalable?
How much data are you backing up today? Tomorrow? Next week, month, year? If you build a backup system to only handle your current needs, it will surely need to be replaced sooner than you'd think. You want to make sure that the backup solution you build will take care of your needs now and will continue to work into the future with minor adjustments rather than needing to be completely replaced in a year or two

Why Secure?
The only thing more important than having good offsite backups of your data is making sure that someone else does not have access to your data. This is where encryption comes in. If your backups are written to an encrypted device (hard drive, tape drive, CDROM, etc) then you can safely transport your backup media on a regular schedule to an off-site location without the fear of your data being compromised.

The Concept:

The end result we are working towards is an inexpensive, reliable, open-source backup system with multiple, removable, encrypted, inexpensive SATA hard drives that may be removed and changed by an end user without the need to do more than unplug a drive and plug another one in.

For the past several years Quantum's "Superloader3" tape libraries have been our device of choice when specifying a tape backup library solution for our clients.

The Superloaders are easy to set up and have proven to be one of the most reliable devices we have had the pleasure of working with - and when it comes to backups, reliability is key.

Regardless of the reliability of the tape library itself, there are other factors that can adversely affect your backups, including drives that require cleaning, bad or broken tapes or other miscellaneous issues.

When these issues occur it pays to be proctive by monitoring your tape library so that you may be made aware of these types of things as quickly as possible.

With Xymon being our preferred monitoring solution, naturally we would write a Xymon script to monitor our Superloader tape libraries. Our xymon_quantumsuperloader_check.sh script reports quite a bit of information about the Superloader including the library's time, autoloader & drive status and firmware versions.

In addition to this basic informational reporting, the script can also report the barcodes of the tapes in each slot of the Superloader's two removable magazines and can set an alert on any drive or tape errors reported.

The latest version of this script and instructions to install it on your Xymon server may be found HERE.

posted from my Nokia N900