How to Monitor the Progress of a Bareos Longterm Backup Job?

[jaemin cha]

Hello,

I would like to check the intermediate progress/status of a Bareos Longterm Backup job while it is being processed.

Currently, we use checkpoints to update and monitor the status of backup jobs, based on the following documentation:
https://docs.bareos.org/Appendix/Checkpoints.html

For regular backup jobs, we check the progress through queries against the Catalog database, such as JobBytes and the current job status. We also use bconsole to monitor the job status.

However, it seems that Longterm Backup jobs are not updated through checkpoints in the same way.

Am I misunderstanding how checkpoints work with Longterm Backup jobs?

If so, could you please explain how the progress/status of a Longterm Backup job can be monitored while it is being processed?

I would appreciate any advice or recommendations on the proper way to monitor this.

Thank you.

[Brock Palen]

I don’t use checkpoints (I use spooling) but how I check the status of the job is actaully to check the status of the client.

status client=<client>

If it’s running a job it shows how many files it has done, the current file it’s processing and total bytes processed so far.


Not sure what you mean about longterm if that means a virtualfull for an off site this might not work.


Brock Palen
bro...@mlds-networks.com
www.mlds-networks.com
Websites, Linux, Hosting, Joomla, Consulting

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[jaemin cha]

Hello,

Thank you for your answer.

When you mentioned spooling, could you please explain what you mean and how it can be used in this case?

I would appreciate it if you could explain this part in more detail, as I may be missing something.

For reference, Longterm Backup refers to the Bareos functionality described below, which is intended to retain incremental backup data for a longer period of time:

https://docs.bareos.org/TasksAndConcepts/AlwaysIncrementalBackupScheme.html (for longterm storage  https://docs.bareos.org/TasksAndConcepts/AlwaysIncrementalBackupScheme.html#virtual-full-jobs )

Regular backup jobs (Full, Incremental, etc.) update the Catalog database through the Checkpoint mechanism. However, Longterm Backup does not seem to be affected by Checkpoints.

I suspect this may be because Longterm Backup operates through the Bareos Storage Daemon (bareos-sd) rather than through the Bareos File Daemon (bareos-fd).

Regarding status client, since the operation does not involve the client in the same way as a regular backup job, I am not sure if it will provide additional information. However, I will give it a try.

Thank you again for your advice.

2026년 8월 18일 화요일 오후 8시 56분 58초 UTC+9에 Brock Palen님이 작성:

[Brock Palen]

Ok I mentioned spooling because the documentation points out that spooling and the current checkpointing code do not work together.

Spooling though might give you want you want. It does mean your writing data to a spool file and then the spool device is drained to your volume, but it will drop entries into the job log like:

2026-08-17 08:15:02 myth-sd JobId 123852: User specified Job spool size reached: JobSpoolSize=80,000,972,838 MaxJobSpoolSize=80,000,000,000
2026-08-17 08:15:02 myth-sd JobId 123852: Writing spooled data to Volume. Despooling 80,000,972,838 bytes ...

So in our case for large VirtualFull every 80GB there is an entry and we can see it with:

list joblog jobid=####

So while it’s not a huge amount of fun on a local machine assuming your not trying to address the issues spooling is meant to address it will slow the VirtualFull down but it will give you a periodic mark of where you are.

Other ways I could infer this (without testing) assuming your doing disk volumes you could set that each client gets only 1 volume, so when the VirtualFull starts you make a new volume that you can then track the size of. Doesn’t work for tape assuming your doing like me and writing to tape ejecting to take off site.

Brock Palen
bro...@mlds-networks.com
www.mlds-networks.com
Websites, Linux, Hosting, Joomla, Consulting

> To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/bareos-users/ba9b5fe8-afd6-4160-b0f2-e397b50fea65n%40googlegroups.com.