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Using Bacula to backup a Synology Nas
Since I use Bacula as my main backup solution and Synology NAS systems for file storage, I wanted to have a way to backup my Synology NAS’s using Bacula but there is not a Bacula package for Synology. I searched the web a good bit and nothing that I could find was really a trustworthy solution until I found a forum talking about just creating a NFS share onto another system and backing the share up on that system. I tried it and it works great and is amazingly fast for both backups and restores.
Here is how my system works.
I created a Virtual Machine running Centos 7 on a separate system and installed the Bacula File Damon and got it all communicating with the Bacula Director. I then mounted all of the NFS shares that I wanted to backup onto this system and verified that the system had indeed mounted the shares. I first had to go into the NFS share permissions on the Synology and give NFS permission to this new servers IP address so it could mount and access the share. I gave it read/write rights so bacula could both backup and restore to the Synology NAS.
Once I got all the shares mounted, I created the the File Set on the main Bacula server for these mounts. I’m using Webmin in these screenshots which works great however I do recommend you sFTP into your main bacula server before making any changes with Webmin and download the etc/bacula folder before starting because I have had Webmin screw up the bacula-dir file more than one time. I set the compression level to LZO to compress the files. This is compressing the file on average 15% and the speed is great; backing up over 250GB per hour on my systems and network.
After the file set is created, I create the job and set the client to the system I setup for backing up the Synology and choose the new file set I created.
Additional Configuration that I do on my backup jobs
Once I completed these, I downloaded the etc/bacula directory again because I have Bacula write the bootstrap file to a different location. In my case, I have another NAS that I use for system backups that I have Bacula write the bootstrap files to for safe keeping if the main Bacula system has an issue. To add this function, I simply add the following line to the jobs section of the job in the bacula-dir file.
Write Bootstrap = “/BackupNAS/BaculaBootstraps/%c_%n.bsr”
This is the complete Job section of a sample job. Note that this one is for a backup up of a SQL database and I have a run before batch file that create a .sql backup file of the database.
Job {
Name = Main-Databases
Type = Backup
Level = Incremental
Client = main-database-fd
FileSet = main-database-FS
Schedule = WeeklyCycle
Storage = BackupSD
Pool = BackupPool
Messages = Standard
Client Run Before Job = C:\DatabaseBackups\script\sql.bat
Write Bootstrap = “/BackupNAS/BaculaBootstraps/%c_%n.bsr”
}This insures the Bacula bootstrap file is in a safe location if the main system fails.
