In my last post, I gave an overview of Bacula, the enterprise-level free backup software. For this post I wanted to dig into the software a bit more and show how simple it is to setup a weekly backup job.
One of the first things we do at SPK when working with a new client is to establish what sort of backup plan they currently have in place and if it is adequate enough. Part of the infrastructure support service that SPK provides includes managing backups and ensuring that nothing mission critical is lost due to hardware failure or even user error. So when discussing this with a client, I often come up with a simple backup plan for data. The most common backup scheme is what I refer to as a Weekly Backup. It’s non-intrusive to the end user, it provides very good coverage of data and is reasonably fast depending on how much is being backed up and how often the data changes.
The scheme is as follows:
Full Backup on Saturday -> Incremental Sunday through Friday -> Full Backup on Saturday
and so on. The last Saturday of the month, the full backup that was performed is sent off-site for 6 months. This ensures data is safe in case of a disaster (fire, earthquake, etc..). If there was a hardware failure, the only data loss would be up to that point from midnight or whenever you run
So how does Bacula fit into all of this? I’ve written up a HOWTO document which details how easy it is to implement. Check it out, and let me know what you think in the comments section!
