Note

You can download this article as a PDF

Cloud Plugin

IT organizations are constantly being challenged to deliver high quality solutions with reduced total cost of ownership. One of those challenges is the growing amount of data to be backed up, together with limited space to keep backups. Another major challenge is to provide adequate off-site backup. Bacula offers several ways to tackle these challenges, one of them being Bacula Cloud Backup, which writes Bacula Volumes to different types of cloud services.

This document is intended to provide insight into the considerations and processes required to successfully implement this backup technique.

A major problem of Cloud backup is that data transmission to and from the Cloud is very slow compared to traditional backup to disk or tape. The Bacula Cloud drivers provide a means to quickly finish the backups and then transfer the data from the local cache to the Cloud in the background. This is done by first splitting the data Volumes into small parts that are cached locally and then uploading those parts to the Cloud storage service in the background, either while the job continues to run or after the backup Job has terminated. Once the parts are written to the Cloud, they may either be left in the local cache for quick restores or they may be removed (truncate cache). Truncating cache volumes may also be configured to occur automatically in the background during a job, or after the job has completed. Truncation may also be disabled, or configured to be run manually.

Bacula Systems has implemented drivers for backup and restore to and from several cloud services, whether public or private. The architecture of the Bacula Enterprise cloud backup will provide the user with an array of features to keep the cloud costs to a minimum and the performance to a maximum.

In a continuous effort to increase end user choices, Bacula Systems has broadened its offer of cloud plugins over the last releases. You can now choose from the following plugins:

S3/Amazon Cloud Plugin
Azure Cloud Plugin
Google Cloud Plugin
Oracle Cloud Plugin
Swift Object Storage Plugin

Each plugin can be purchased separately. A Cloud File driver, which is useful for testing the Cloud architecture without requiring a Cloud account, is also included and could possibly be useful for a disk media device that is very slow.