Updating Bacula — Database Issues

Introduction

Backups, a subject always talked about but rarely put into practice. If you do happen to have a backup solution, excellent, you probably sleep easier than most knowing your data is safe.

I've been using bacula for my backup solution for over a year now and one thing I've never had enough experience with has been upgrades. The upgrade process can be pretty hairy depending on your distribution, level of investment, &c.

Updating Bacula

Recently, bacula-5.0.2-r1 was marked stable in the portage tree (Gentoo). Upon finishing the emerge, I attempted to restart all of the bacula services to bring the new version live:

/etc/init.d/bacula-sd restart
/etc/init.d/bacula-fd restart
/etc/init.d/bacula-dir restart

The Problem

All went well until I performed the restart on the directory (bacula-dir). At that point things took a turn for the worse. The director didn't want to start and there were no messages on the screen indicating why this might be the case.

The Solution

The database needed some schema changes to be applied before the director could start again. In order to determine this I ran the following:

bacula -u root -g bacula -c /etc/bacula/bacula-dir.conf -fvm

This finally output the magical answer: update the database schema a couple of versions. It's important to know which versions you're dealing with as you must run each update to the database individually.

The database update scripts are located in /usr/libexec/bacula/updatedb/ and when run in the correct order will get you back up and running in short order. Afterwards, restart the bacula-dir service and everything should be up and running again.

Conclusion

When updating bacula don't forget the catalog database may have changes that need to be applied as well before the service will restart correctly.