What's the best way to back up Amazon EC2 machines with Bacula? Currently it seems not possible to use S3, is that correct? Could it just be done with EBS?
1 Answer
It should be possible to back up Amazon EC2 machines to S3 with Bacula, as that is possible for non-EC2 machines. That is how I do some backups. Though, 'possible' doesn't mean 'directly supported by Bacula' or even 'easy'.
In my case configuring Bacula with S3 storage meant using both 's3cmd' utility and 's3fs' user-space file system and configuring Bacula to do 'DVD' backup with specially crafted 'part write' and 'mount' scripts. I have encountered a lot of failures until I tuned the scripts so everything worked reliably.
With EBS on EC2 things should be much easier, as EBS can be treated as a regular disk. Just use the instructions for backing up to disks.
I guess that with EC2 your biggest problem should be how to maintain a reliable Bacula catalog. EC2 machines can be restarted anytime and databases, like Bacula catalog do not like that.