[Bacula-users] Bacula status

[Kern S. <ke...@si...>]

Hello,

Now that Bacula 1.20 is released, virtually all the 
basic features are implemented (some are still quite
primitive though). Over the next month or two, I'm 
planning to focus on the following items:

Minor details:
- Fix any bugs I find or you report.
- Finish the implementation of automatic pruning 
  (add pruning of Restore and Verify jobs). 
- Make sure pruning of Volumes won't prune the
  only backup of a FileSet

Major Project:
- Improve the Restore capabilities of Bacula
  * Restore to most recent system state (i.e.
    figure out what tapes need to be mounted and
    in what order).
  * Restore to a particular time (perhaps several
    variations -- e.g. before date, after date).
  * Interactive Restore where you get to select 
    what files are to be restored (much like the Unix
    "restore" program permits). Now that we have a
    catalog of all files saved, it would be nice to
    be able to use it. 
  * Restore options (overwrite, overwrite if older,
    overwrite if newer, never overwrite, ...)
  * Improve the standalone programs (bls and bextract)
    to have pattern matching capabilities (e.g. restore
    by FileSet, Job, JobType, JobLevel, ...). 
  * Ideally after each Job, Bacula could write out a 
    set of commands to a file that if later feed to
    bextract would restore your system to the current
    state (at least for the saved FileSet).  This would 
    provide a simple disaster recovery that could be 
    initiated from a "floppy" and one simple ASCII control 
    file. I'm not exactly sure how to do this, but it
    shouldn't be too hard and I'll 
    be trying to go in this direction.
  
Smaller Projects:
- Implement tape verification to ensure that the data
  written for a particular Job can really be read.
- Compare tape File attributes to Catalog.
  (File attributes are size, dates, MD5, but not
   data).
- Compare tape to Client files (attributes, or
  attributes and data) 

Playing around:
- With the current Bacula 1.21 (not yet in the CVS) I
  expect there is about 95% chance that running multiple
  simultaneous Jobs will actually work without stepping
  on each other. I'm planning to try this sometime soon.


Any comments or suggestions are welcome.

Best regards,

Kern