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The Windows Version of BaculaGeneralAt the current time only the File daemon or Client program has been tested on Windows. As a consequence, when we speak of the Windows version of Bacula below, we are referring to the File daemon only.The Windows version of the Bacula File daemon has been tested on Win98, WinMe, WinNT, and Win2000 systems. We have coded to support Win95, but no longer have a system for testing. The Windows version of Bacula has been built to run under the CYGWIN environment, which provides many of the features of Unix on Windows systems. It also permitted a rapid port with very few source code changes, which means that the Windows version is for the most part running code that has long proved stable on Unix systems. Even though the Win32 version of Bacula is a port that relies on many Unix features, it is just the same a true Windows program. When running, it is perfectly integrated with Windows and displays its icon in the system icon tray, and provides a system tray menu to obtain additional information on how Bacula is running (status and events dialog boxes). If so desired, it can also be stopped by using the system tray menu, though this should normally never be necessary. Once installed Bacula normally runs as a system service. This means that it is immediately started by the operating system when the system is booted, and runs in the background even if there is no user logged into the system. InstallationNormally, you will install the Windows version of Bacula from the binaries. This install is somewhat Unix like since you do some parts of the installation by hand. To install the binaries, you need WinZip.
This installation assumes that you do not have and never had CYGWIN installed on your computer. If you do, you will need to take care to observe the minor differences to the standard installation that we will note in this text. If you have CYGWIN installed on your system and you use the standard installation scripts rather than the CYGWIN specific scripts mentioned below, they will remove your mount points (automatically setup by the CYGWIN installation) and CYGWIN will no longer work until it is re-installed. Once you have unzipped the binaries, open a window pointing to the binary installation folder (normally c:\bacula). This folder should contain additional folders such as bin. (For CYGWIN installations, this is c:\cygwin\bacula\bin, ...). Continuing the installation process:
![]() ![]() ![]() The Events item is currently unimplemented, by selecting the Status item, you can verify whether any jobs are running or not. When the Bacula File Server begins saving files, the color of
the holes in the cassette icon will change from white to green
If you are using remote desktop connections between your windows boxes, be warned that that tray icon does not always appear. It will always be visible when you log into the console, but the remote desktop may not display it. Installation DirectoryThe Win32 version of Bacula must reside in the c:\bacula\ directory, and there must be a c:\tmp directory on your machine. The installation will do this automatically, and we recommend that you do not attempt to place Bacula in another directory. If you do so, you are on your own, and you will need to do a rebuild of the source. Note, on systems with Cygwin installed, Bacula should reside in c:\cygwin\bacula.UpgradingOn Win98 systems, to upgrade to a new release, simply stop Bacula by using the tray icon and selecting the Close Bacula menu item, or by double clicking on the Stop icon located in the c:\bacula\bin directory, then apply the upgrade and restart Bacula.On WinNT, WinXP, and Win2K systems, you may stop Bacula by using the tray icon menu as indicated above or alternatively you may stop Bacula by using the Services item in the Control Panel. Then to restart Bacula after the new files have been loaded, go to the Services dialog as shown above in the installation instructions and click on Start. On WinXP systems, the Services dialog is a bit different and is found by following: Control Panel -> Administrative Tools -> Component Services. Then click on Services (Local) in the left hand menu window and the services should appear in the right hand window, from which point, you can select Bacula and start it. Post InstallationAfter installing Bacula and before running it, you should check the contents of c:\bacula\bin\bacula-fd.conf to ensure that it corresponds to your configuration.Dealing with ProblemsThe most likely source of problems is authentication when the Director attempts to connect to the File daemon that you installed. This can occur if the names and the passwords defined in the File daemon's configuration file c:\bacula\bin\bacula-fd.conf on the Windows machine do not match with the names and the passwords in the Director's configuration file bacula-dir.conf located on your Unix/Linux server.More specifically, the password found in the Client resource in the Director's configuration file must be the same as the password in the Director resource of the File daemon's configuration file. In addition, the name of the Director resource in the File daemon's configuration file must be the same as the name in the Director resource of the Director's configuration file. It is a bit hard to explain in words, but if you understand that a Director normally has multiple Clients and a Client (or File daemon) may permit access by multiple Directors, you can see that the names and the passwords on both sides must match for proper authentication. One user had serious problems with the configuration file until he realized that the Unix end of line conventions were used and Bacula wanted them in Windows format. This has not been confirmed though. If there are other programs like Bacula on your system that use Cygwin, such as VCD-Easy, you may not be able to run the two programs at the same time because they are using different versions of Cygwin. As a consequence, if Bacula just won't start, see what other programs are running on your system. Running Unix like programs on Windows machines is a bit frustrating because the Windows command line shell (DOS Window) is rather primitive. As a consequence, it is not generally possible to see the debug information and certain error messages that Bacula prints. With a bit of work, however, it is possible. When everything else fails and you want to see what is going on, try the following: Start a DOS shell Window. cd c:\bacula\bin bacula-fd -t >out type outThe -t option will cause Bacula to read the configuration file, print any error messages and then exit. the > redirects the output to the file named out, which you can list with the type command. If something is going wrong later, or you want to run Bacula with a debug option, you might try starting it as: bacula-fd -d 100 >outIn this case, Bacula will run until you explicitly stop it, which will give you a chance to connect to it from your Unix/Linux server. In addition, you should look in the System Applications log on the Control Panel to find any Windows errors that Bacula got during the startup process. Windows Compatibility ConsiderationsIf any applications are running during the backup and they have open files, Bacula will not be able to backup those files, so be sure you close your applications (or tell your users to close their applications) before the backup.Bacula doesn't know about the system registry, so you will either need to write it out to an ASCII file using regedit /e or use a program specifically designed to make a copy or backup the registry. In Bacula versions 1.30 and earlier, we used the Cygwin emulation of Unix open(), read(), write(), ... calls to access files. This worked pretty well for Win95, Win98, and WinMe systems, but not very well for the other systems (NT/2K/XP) because those systems have special security and ownership information that was not saved. In addition on the NT/2K/XP systems, older versions of Bacula were not always able to access all files due to system permissions restrictions. As a consequence, in Bacula version 1.31 and later, we use Windows backup API calls by default. Typical of Windows, programming these special BackupRead and BackupWrite calls is a real nightmare of complications. The end result gives some distinct advantages and some disadvantages. First, the advantages are that on WinNT/2K/XP systems, the security and ownership information is now backed up. In addition, with the exception of files in use by another program (a major disaster for backup programs on Windows), Bacula can now access all system files. This means that when you restore files, the security and ownership information will be restored on WinNT/2K/XP along with the data. The disadvantage of the Windows backup API calls is that it produces non-portable backups. That is files and their data that are backed up on WinNT using the native API calls (BackupRead/BackupWrite) cannot be restored on Win95/98/Me or Unix systems. In principle, a file backed up on WinNT can be restored on WinXP, but this remains to be seen in practice (not yet tested). In addition, the stand-alone tools such as bls and bextract cannot be used to retrieve the data for those files because those tools are not available on Windows. All restores must use the Bacula restore command. This restriction is mentioned for completeness, but in practice should not create any problems. As a default, Bacula backs up Windows systems using the Windows API calls. If you want to backup data on a WinNT/2K/XP system and restore it on a Unix/Win95/98/Me system, we have provided a special portable option that backups the data in a portable fashion by using portable API calls. See the portable option on the Include statement in a FileSet resource in the Director's configuration chapter for the details on setting this option. However, using the portable option means you may have permissions problems accessing files, and none of the security and ownership information will be backed up or restored. The file data can, however, be restored on any system. You should always be able to restore any file backed up on Unix or Win95/98/Me to any other system. On some systems, such as WinNT/2K/XP, you may have to reset the ownership of such restored files. Any file backed up on WinNT/2K/XP should in principle be able to be restored to a similar system (i.e. WinNT/2K/XP), however, I am unsure of the consequences if the owner information and accounts are not identical on both systems. Bacula will not let you restore files backed up on WinNT/2K/XP to any other system (i.e. Unix Win95/98/Me) if you have used the defaults. Finally, if you specify the portable=yes option on the files you back up. Bacula will be able to restore them on any other system. However, any WinNT/2K/XP specific security and ownership information will be lost. The following matrix will give you an idea of what you can expect. Thanks to Marc Brueckner for doing the tests:
Utility FunctionsThe directory c:\Bacula\bin contains six utility routines (actually .bat files) that you may find useful. They are:Start Stop Install Uninstall CygwinInstall CygwinUnInstallAny of these utilities may be used on any system, with the exception of the Start utility, which cannot be used on WinNT, Win2000 and WinXP systems. On those systems, the Bacula service must always be started through the Services sub-dialog of the Control Panel. The Install and Uninstall utilities install and uninstall Bacula from the system registry only. All other pieces (files) of Bacula remain intact. It is not absolutely necessary for Bacula to be installed in the registry as it can run as a regular program. However, if it is not installed in the registry, it cannot be run as a service. The Console ProgramThe Bacula Console program has been included in the distribution in the Bacula bin directory. You can execute it from any Windows DOS box. Using this program, you can start a job on the main server (Director) from your Windows workstation.The testfind ProgramA program named testfind is also included in the Bacula bin directory. This program is documented in the testfind section of the Utility Tools chapter of this manual. It permits you to list the files that will be backed up given the list of Include statements from your Director's configuration file. Note, the important functionality of this program (i.e. listing the files to be backed up) can be obtained directly in Bacula by using the estimate command in the Console program.Please note that the functionality of testfind is now for the most part included in the console estimate command. Please see the Console chapter of this manual for more details. Windows Disaster RecoveryWe don't currently have a good solution for disaster recovery on Windows as we do on Linux. The main piece lacking is a Windows boot floppy or a Windows boot CD. Microsoft releases a Windows Pre-installation Environment (WinPE) that could possibly work, but we have not investigated it. This means that until someone figures out the correct procedure, you must restore the OS from the installation disks, then you can load a Bacula client and restore files. Please don't count on using bextract to extract files from your backup tapes during a disaster recovery unless you have backed up those files using the portable option. bextract does not run on Windows, and the normal way Bacula saves files using the Windows API prevents the files from being restored on a Unix machine. Once you have an operational Windows OS loaded, you can run the File daemon and restore your user files.Please see Disaster Recovery of Win32 Systems for the latest suggestion, which looks very promissing. It looks like Bart PE Builder, which creates a Windows PE (Pre-installation Environment) Boot-CD, may be just what is needed to build a complete disaster recovery system for Win32. This distribution can be found at http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/ . Windows Ownership and Permissions ProblemsIf you restore files backed up from WinNT/XP/2K to an alternate directory, Bacula may need to create some higher level directories that were not saved (or restored). In this case, the File daemon will create them under the SYSTEM account because that is the account that Bacula runs under as a service. As of version 1.32f-3, Bacula creates these files with full access permission. However, there may be cases where you have problems accessing those files even if you run as administor. In principle, Microsoft supplies you with the way to cease the ownership of those files and thus change the permissions. However, a much better solution to working with and changing Win32 permissions is the program SetACL, which can be found at http://setacl.sourceforge.net/ .Manually resetting the PermissionsThe following solution was provided by Dan Langille <dan at langille in the dot org domain>. The steps are performed using Windows 2000 Server but they should apply to most Win32 platforms. The procedure outlines how to deal with a problem which arises when a restore creates a top-level new directory. In this example, "top-level" means something like c:\src, not c:\tmp\src where c:\tmp already exists. If a restore job specifies / as the Where: value, this problem will arise. The problem appears as a directory which cannot be browsed with Windows Explorer. The symptoms include the following message when you try to click on that directory:
If you encounter this message, the following steps will change the permissions to allow full access.
With the above procedure, you should now have full control over your restored directory. Backing Up the WinNT/XP/2K System StateA suggestion by Damian Couttsntbackup backup systemstate /F c:\systemstate.bkfThe backup is the command, the systemstate says to backup only the system state and not all the user files, and the /F c:\systemstate.bkf specifies where to write the state file. this file must then be saved and restored by Bacula. To restore the system state, you first reload a base operating system if the OS is damaged, otherwise, this is not necessary, then you would use Bacula to restore all the damaged or lost user's files and to recover the c:\systemstate.bkf file. Finally if there are any damaged or missing system files or registry problems, you run NTBackup and catalogue the system statefile, and then select it for restore. The documentation says you can't run a command line restore of the systemstate. To the best of my knowledge, this has not yet been tested. If you test it, please report your results to the Bacula email list. Windows Considerations for Filename SpecificationsPlease see the Director's Configuration chapter of this manual for important considerations on how to specify Windows paths in Bacula FileSet Include and Exclude directives.Command Line Options Specific to the Bacula Windows File Daemon (Client)These options are not normally seen or used by the user, and are documented here only for information purposes. At the current time, to change the default options, you must either manually run Bacula or you must manually edit the system registry and modify the appropriate entries.In order to avoid option clashes between the options necessary for Bacula to run on Windows and the standard Bacula options, all Windows specific options are signaled with a forward slash character (/), while as usual, the standard Bacula options are signaled with a minus (-), or a minus minus (--). All the standard Bacula options can be used on the Windows version. In addition, the following Windows only options are implemented:
Building the Win32 Version from the SourceIf you have the source code, follow the standard procedures for building Bacula on Unix in the Installation Section of this manual. Please don't forget to look at the Win32 specific instructions.
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