Kevin,

Thank you for the update, and your kind words. I was thinking about you
today, hoped you were going to be able to get it figured out. Sorry, I
would have replied sooner but I have a bit of a head cold and don't have
much energy right now.

I know I have iterated through setting up bacula, not just once, but again,
and again, and again (different scenarios each time, tape, local disc
backup, cloud backup). It seems that there is always something new to
discover about bacula. I have found it to be very useful to document every
step I take to set up bacula, and when I think I have things where I want
them, I blow away my (testing) environment and follow my document to make
sure it is complete and does lead me to the result I want.

I would like to suggest the bacula front end, bacularis (developed by
Marcin, who is on this list also). Bacularis has helped me many times with
easy observation and control of Bacula's activity, and VERY helpful
highlighting of errors in the recent log events. Turning a little log icon
red and letting me jump to the red highlighted error lines has seriously
helped me immensely.
Https://bacularis.app

Bill A has a very helpful email reporting script. I've set it up with one
of my bacula installations so far, and its been quite helpful for
monitoring Bacula's status. I definitely need to deploy it at my other
bacula instances as well. Please note that AFAIK, baculabackupreport does
not support encryption. For this reason, I connected it to a postfix
install, and let postfix handle SSL.
Check out his other scripts as well. Drop in replacements for Bacula's
mtx-changer and tapealert look interesting to me.
Bill is also on this list.
https://github.com/waa/

Bill also has a set of dummy resources for bacula (not on github as far as
I can see, but you can easily make them yourself). The general idea is that
jobs sometimes require specification of resources they dont actually use.
For example the Verify-Job doesn't use a client, pool, or fileset, but a
valid client, pool and fileset resource are required by the bacula
configuration parser. For this reason, Bill has found it useful to create
empty pool, client, and fileset resources with the name "None", and an
empty schedule named "Manual". These dummy resources make it easier to
visually parse what is happening when skimming through the config file.

less /opt/bacula/log/bacula.log   # very helpful indeed. If it happens in a
joblog somewhere, it is also logged to this file as well.

echo "some bconsole command" | bconsole | grep some-keyword  # also quite
useful for searching bconsole output.
Example:
echo help list | bconsole | grep log

Test your bacula configuration files for validity with:
sudo bacula-dir -t -u bacula -g bacula
sudo bacula-sd -t -u bacula -g bacula

Never run bacula-dir or bacula-sd as root. It'll create PID, state, and
lock files in the bacula working directory that the usual bacula user will
be unable to modify.

Stay in touch, and let us know if you have any other questions. :)

Robert Gerber
402-237-8692
[email protected]

On Tue, Dec 9, 2025, 1:04 AM Kevin Buckley <
[email protected]> wrote:

> On 2025/12/08 15:49, Kevin Buckley wrote:
> > On 2025/12/08 15:17, Rob Gerber wrote:
> >> Glad you got it working!
> >
> > Not sure I have though, in that nothing seems to have happened,
> > messages-wise, in quite some time.
>
> Just wanted to add something further into this thread, just in case
> someone finds it and tries to use the info Rob Gerber supplied as
> a basis for their own solution.
>
> It turns out that Rob's observation in Point 2, vis:
>
>    The tape drive appears not to have a suitable tape labeled and
>    appendable, though it's possible that the misconfiguration that
>    caused all this tied up a suitable tape while attempting to use
>    the same resource as both source and destination (valid if you
>    wanted to copy a tape, but not in your case).
>
> was hitting a nail on the head, albeit it wasn't the misconfiguration
> that caused all this that tied up a suitable tape, but the fact that
> I had blown away the Bacula installation at some point (it's a bit
> of an iterative process whilst testing things out) and had, it has
> since come to light, not "told" Bacula about the tapes, sitting in
> the Autochanger, that had previously been labelled before things
> had been blown away.
>
> Once those tapes had been relabelled, and placed into the TapeCP
> Pool in passing, I now have data being copied from disk backup
> over to the tapes.
>
> Thanks again to Rob for the sheer depth of his reply, even if
> I wasn't able to see the wood for the trees straight away,
> Kevin Buckley
>
>
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