Linux BMR: How BMR Works

Bacula Enterprise Only

This solution is only available for Bacula Enterprise. For subscription inquiries, please reach out to sales@baculasystems.com.

This chapter describes the how Bare Metal Recovery works.

The Bacula Enterprise LinuxBMR toolkit consists of several parts, each designed to fulfill one of the tasks in a BMR-enabled backup and recovery environment. In addition, some configuration of Bacula is required to ensure the software is actually used. Accordingly, well-defined procedures of how to install, deploy and use the BMR backup tools as well as how to do a BMR exist.

We will describe the software, the required configuration, and how to use it together in more detail after giving an overview first.

The overall approach to allow BMR is to collect essential system information during the backup itself, and to use that information during a BMR session to set up the new hardware to allow immediate reuse of the restored system, applications and data after the BMR is finished.

For the actual backup, after configuring the backup jobs accordingly, no additional effort is required.

During recovery, the essential disk partitioning data is pulled from the existing backups, applied to the BMR machine so that the target system is set up as needed, and then the actual restore is initiated. These steps, plus selection of what client to restore to, and what point in time to recover from is all handled by an easy to use GUI interface which is part of Bacula Systems’ LinuxBMR recovery image.

The LinuxBMR recovery image may be downloaded from your download area. This ISO image may be written to a CD, a DVD, or a USB key. It is also possible to customize the image with some information related to your infrastructure. The image size varies with different releases of the product, so it may exceed the usable capacity of CDs.

The important fact is that, unlike other BMR approaches, no source system specific information is stored on the recovery media itself, which means that only one site-specific disaster recovery media is required.