Bareos

Bareos is a free (as in freedom) backup, archiving, and recovery software suite. It is actively developed (on Github) and supported commercially and by the user community.

Building and packaging it

This was not too terrible. For reasons that I have lost track of, I am working with the 23.x release stream at present. Binary package builds complete with only minor tweaking. Specifically, I have NDMP support disabled in debian/rules, and NDMP library packaging commented out in debian/bareos-common.install.in. Some number of not-specified-in debian/control build dependencies were installed, too.

Install and configure the director

In the Bareos world, the director is the central brain of the backup operation. It schedules jobs, keeps track of clients, knows what files have been saved and where the saved copies are located. All that central housekeeping sort of stuff. The Bareos director keeps track of file inventory and such in a PostgreSQL database. So for a working installation of the director, the following packages ought to be installed: bareos-common, bareos-database-common, bareos-database-postgresql, bareos-database-tools, and bareos-director. Also, there needs to be a PostgreSQL database server reachable on the network. bitkeeper-0, the backup server, has sufficient RAM, CPU, and disk for this. So, we are going to simply use it for the database and the backup director functionality. The postinstall configure operation for the bareos-database-common will helpfully create the required database in the PostgreSQL cluster if needed.