Looking for recommendations where to store the bsr and the BackupCatalog file on single tape server

[DUCARROZ Birgit]

I'm a total newbe in tape backup.

I wonder which is the best practice to store the bsr files and where to
backup the Catalog on a server with a single tape drive.

Would this be on the tape itself or somewhere on a HD / mount on the server?

If I backup the Catalog on the tape after each backup, how easy would be
a restore?

Assuming you have archive drives which you will store for 10 years and
afterwards you install a new backup server, will you be able to re-read
these drives if the Catalog is directly on the tape or will this only be
possible if you migrated all the database on the new server?

How do you manage this?

I thought on the following concept (please tell me what you think about
that):

- for the database files, all bsr files and the Catalog Backup I tought
to mount an external share, which will be easy to migrate from one to
another bareos server.
- Tapes just for the volumes.


Thank you in advance for some hints.
Regards,
Birgit

[spadaj]

You don't have to back up bsr files. True, they can be written after
backup job but they are also created for a restore job based on a file
selection, timerange selection and so on from the data stored in
catalog. So the bsr files are not necessary to back up as far as I know.
Another thing is the database backup. It's possible to import a media
without prior information in catalog but it requires reading of the
whole tape. And if you're not sure where is your database stored, you'd
have to rescan several tapes which would be quite time-consuming.
So it's IMO a good practice to have configuration backup (including
crypto material!) and catalog database backup available on a easily
accessible media (i.e. dumped onto a some directory NFS-exported from
another server). This way in case of a disaster you can easily restore
your bareos installation by simply reinstalling software, restoring
config files and loading database from dump.
It's also worth noting that archiving is a different process than
backup. Sure, you can use bareos for it but archiving process objectives
are different than backup. There is also hugely different time span that
you need to provide data availability for so you'd have to architect
your solution accordingly. YMMV but I'd try to go for more incremental
approach to copying data to tape but also focused on having multiple
copies of every instance of data (possibly at least three).

Best regards
MK

W dniu 16.05.2020 o 21:27, 'DUCARROZ Birgit' via bareos-users pisze:

[Brock Palen]

Similar here, I have used Bareos/Bacula for over 10 years, many restores, etc. Added a single tape drive when switched to Bareos and client initiated connections and easy encryption let me backup a lot more desktops for roaming people.

Over that time I still dont’ quite understand when BSR’s come into play and have never used one though I still write them to my local drive. I do not back them up to tape.

As for Catalog, it’s backed up to it’s own Pool on disk, but an Run Script then takes the volume and pushes it to a cloud provider with rclone. It along with all the crypto information etc. This way I can run a bscan etc. and recreate the catalog if needed in true DR.
I also changed around the catalog backup script it still just dumps to a text file and backs that text file up. So fi the DB is just corrupted (on a different disk) I have a SQL dump on the Director I can just import. If I need to go further back I have the volumes (that only allow one job) on the cloud I can download and run bscan on. Etc.

But yeah BSR’s still not sure what they are used for.

With tape if your using application managed encryption be very sure to backup your configs with your encryption information. That key is used with the key in the Catalog to decrypt (if I reading the docs right). So if you think your backing up your Director for DR and planning on using bscan you wont’ be able to because you wont’ have the key.

I keep that key (along with the creds for the cloud provider with the catalog backups) in multiple places. You cannot lose those encryption keys. Same applies to on disk encryption but I have not bothered with that only tape encryption.


Brock Palen
1 (989) 277-6075
bro...@mlds-networks.com
www.mlds-networks.com
Websites, Linux, Hosting, Joomla, Consulting

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[DUCARROZ Birgit]

Thank you Brock Palen and spadaj!
This helps me a lot!

Kind regards,
Birgit