how to quickly restore some files in case the server room burns down....

[Andy Feys]

Hi,

I'm evaluating Bareos as a backup solution. So far I succeeded in installing a test bareos server, a test bareos client and configure the backups. This seems to work. No problem there, I think I understand this now. 

I backup to the hard disk of the test bareos server.  Data is currently stored in /var/lib/bareos/storage. The bootstrap files are stored in /var/lib/bareos.

In my old system I backup all my servers to one workstation with a lot of diskspace (each server has its own folder) and then copy the data to external 12TB encrypted usb disks which are stored off-site in a safe in another city. I have 5 disks in a weekly rotation, and then another 12 disks, one for each month of the year. This is fine for our purposes, and should result in no more than a few days worth of data lost in case our building burns down or a plane crashes into it. We can live with that (better 2 days lost than all data lost). This works, but is a lot of work to check if everything is running fine because not all servers use the same backup software, so there is no one dashboard to check it all at a glance.

I really like bareos for the backup of our servers to the one workstation. And I can then rsync all my data from /var/lib/bareos to the external usb disks just like I do now.

But here is my question: how do I restore the data from the usb disks when the bareos server has burned down? Ideally I would like to make some bootable USB sticks to store in the safe which can read the backupdata from the external usb disk and restore certain files or folders (or everything) to a temporary location. 

Let's say I want to restore the latest version of folder /data/projects/AwesomeProject1 from the backup of server MickeyMouse so my colleagues can get back to work asap after our building has burned down giving me time to re-install all servers and restore all data.  Is there a simple command line tool that can read the backups and restore the last backup?

I would like to be able to plugin the external usb drive, boot my laptop from the usb stick where all necessary tools and scripts are pre-installed and get the data (either all or a specific file or folder) asap and as easily as possible. I want to restore to a locally mounted location (for example /data/restoreddata)

How would you do that? I can mount the encrypted usb drive just fine on my laptop, and then  I have a /mnt/extdisk folder which contains my complete /var/lib/bareos folder from the bareos server.

Is there a command that would work like this:

bareosquickrestore   -from /mnt/extdisk/MickeyMouse.bsr    -to /data/restoreddata           -selectfiles /data/projects/AwesomeProject1/*    -restoredate latest

very grateful for any tips/hints/links. 

best regards,

Andy

[Andy Feys]

just a quick answer to my own question (in case someone else is interested).

Commands needed are:

bls

bextract

(this link provided me with the necessary info: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31410077/bacula-bareos-disaster-recover-from-scratch-using-bextract)