RE: [Bacula-devel] Encouraging Further Development - Some Ideas

[Rick M. <ri...@wo...>]

Hello Everyone,

Lots of replies on these ideas so let me expand on them a little bit.  

1.  File Encryption.  Communications to/from the FD to the DIR should be
encrypted in such a way to ensure that a unscrupulous person with a sniffer
can not do anything with the backup "stream" to recreate the backup on
another system.  

The DIR or probably the SD would encrypt the backup for storage use a
variety of methods DES, AES...  Of course this brings some other issues with
it for restoring and virus scanning.  

2.  With the development of Kern's "plugin" it seems that antivirus will be
fairly straight forward to implement.  I think (something I do a lot of)
that having a backup is great, however having a backup that you know is
clean from viruses is much better.  At least having an antivirus report
after the backup has completed can help the backup administrator to be a
little more active in making sure that the antivirus solution for their
servers are up to date and working. 

This would also lead to an option in restoring files that have been
infected.  The user could choose whether to restore the infected file or
not.

3. I am a Visual Studio 2003 .NET programmer that will be starting to work
with the Volume Shadow Copy API.  I have to look at this API in more detail,
but as I understand it now, it will allow for in use files to be backed up.
So even if we can't release the source code for recompiling a module for
this, I don't see a problem releasing a dll to be included in the Bacula
system.  I could be wrong - but I think I'm right :)

In any case I would be willing to dedicate some resources to VSS to see if
this would finally allow a proper full backup of a windows system to take
place in Bacula.  

When it comes to backing up MS-SQL I have writing a system to use the
SQL-DMO object API to backup the Microsoft SQL 2000 using a super simple
GUI.  This could be rewritten to allow the Bacula FD to detect and backup
Microsoft SQL Databases.  Just an idea.

4. I'm not a Linux programmer, and I'm new to this list.  I don't want to
step on anyone's toes, I just want to help develop Bacula.  So let me know
what is the best way to help meet these goals/ideas.


Rick