Scope

Bacula Enterprise Google Workspace Plugin is applicable on environments using any Workspace subscription.

This paper presents solutions for Bacula Enterprise version 14.1 and later, and is not applicable to prior versions.

Note

Important considerations

Before using this plugin, please carefully read the elements discussed in this section.

Empty Files

In general, empty files (files with 0 byte contents) are simply not backed up by Google Workspace plugin. In particular, Google Drive files will show a message in the joblog to inform about empty files detected and so not processed.

Files and Objects Spooling

In general, this plugin backups two types of information:

• Objects

• Files

Objects are elements representing some entity in Google Workspace such as a files metadata.

While objects are directly streamed from memory to the backup engine, files need to be downloaded to the FD host before being sent. This is done in order to make some checks and to improve overall performance, as this way operations can be paralleled. Every file is removed just after being completely downloaded and sent to the backup engine.

The path used for this purpose is established by the ‘path’ plugin variable, that usually is set up in the gw_backend script with the value: /opt/bacula/working

Inside the path variable, a ‘spool’ directory will be created and used for those temporary download processes.

Therefore, it is necessary to have at least enough disk space available for the size of the largest file in the backup session. If you are using concurrency between jobs or through the same job (by default this is the case through the concurrent_threads=5 parameter), you would need at least that size for the largest file multiplied by the number of operations in parallel you run.

For emails it is important to note that download operations are done in one step because of some API requirements. This means the jvm should have enough memory to load those downloaded files inside RAM. In case you suffer any memory issue, please refer to the troubleshooting section to find out how to increase it.

Accurate Mode and Virtual Full Backups

Accurate mode and Virtual Full backups are not supported. These features will be addressed in future versions of this plugin.

Google Workspace APIs General Disclaimer

Google Workspace APIs are owned by Google and they can change or evolve at any time. Almost all service APIs are actively developed, containing new features every week, even if the version number of the service is not changed as a result of any of those additions. Just as an example, Google Drive API now is tagged as v3 (and this plugin is using that version to work).

This situation is significantly different from traditional on-premise software, where each update is clearly numbered and controlled for a given server, so applications consuming that software, can clearly state what is offered and what are the target supported versions.

Google is committed to try not to break any existing functionality that could affect external applications. However, this situation can actually happen and therefore, cause some occasional problems with this plugin. Bacula Systems controls this with an advanced automatic monitoring system which is always checking the correct behavior of existing features, and will react quickly to that hypothetical event, but please be aware of the nature and implications of this kind of cloud technologies.

Go back to the Google Workspace Plugin article.