Bacula and the Windows

Environment

Arno Lehmann
Jack of all trades
Bacula Systems SA
Agenda

● Why Windows is different

● What we can do now
– Plain file backups
– Applications using plugins
● What we will be able to do in the future
– More applications supported
– Different ways for some applications
– Better integration of “advanced” platform features

©Bacula Systems S.A. - 2014 2

Why Windows is Different

● Most important: Admins tend to think in terms of

GUI
– This is changing with MS's switch to rely on
PowerShell and encourage running Servers without
GUI
● Deep integration of system and applications
– VSS
● ...

©Bacula Systems S.A. - 2014 3

More Differences

● File system features that are important, but

managed totally different than on POSIX
platforms
– Snapshots
– Encryption
– Dedupe
– DFS
– Metadata / ACLs
● Non-POSIX APIs for backup purposes
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What we can do now

● Back up files, even locked ones

– VSS in FD itself
● Translate encodings of file names (mostly)
● Restore locked files
● Handle some special cases by plugins
– AD
– BMR (not implying p2v / v2p)
– Systemstate
– Some others
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Plugins Available

● VSS
– SystemState
– More Windows stuff (all “core” VSS writers)
– Exchange
– SQL Server
● SAP
● Oracle
● Delta
– (plain, large files with small changes)
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More Plugins

● alldrives
– Automatically detect all drives and create VSS
snapshots for them
● BMR
– Backup enriched with information allowing to do
Bare-Metal Recovery

©Bacula Systems S.A. - 2014 7

Looking ahead

● Three areas of work

– Maintaining and iteratively improving existing
features
● alldrives
● Exchange, SQL Server (simpler, interactive restores)
● More than one VSS job concurrently
● Better handling of mounted file systems
– Adding new features
● Encrypted and / or deduplicated files
● ReFS ?

©Bacula Systems S.A. - 2014 8

Looking ahead
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●

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● we see
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©Bacula Systems S.A. - 2014 do. 9
Looking further ahead

– Supporting more environments with Plugins

● SD on Windows, including SAN shared storage
● SQL server without VSS
● Granular restores of Exchange and Sharepoint objects
● New applications – Lotus Notes comes to mind

©Bacula Systems S.A. - 2014 10

Looking further ahead

©Bacula Systems S.A. - 2014 11

 Thank you!

Arno Lehmann
arno.lehmann@baculasystems.com

©Bacula Systems S.A. - 2014