9.0 Bacula Release!

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According to Kern Sibbald, the leading Bacula Community developer, this is either the biggest Bacula release ever made or one of the biggest ones. Even without the new Aligned Volumes source code, which is substantial, there are over 400,000 lines of diff output between Release 7.4.7 and the release of 9.0.0

This version was thoroughly tested. But as always, please backup any previous version and test this version prior to putting it into production.

Most part the changes were contributed to the Bacula project by Bacula Systems SA and Kern Sibbald, but there were also contributions from other developers that are saluted by the community.

Database Update

This version of Bacula requires a database update. The installation process must involve running the update_bacula_tables script, located at Bacula script directory. It is advisable to perform the bacula database backup before updating it.

Compatibility

As always, both the Director and Storage daemon(s) must be upgraded at the same time and to the same version, the same thing for the File Daemon on the same machine. Backup clients machine can stay with older File Daemons. but should be upgraded when possible to be compatible with some new features.

New Features (summary)

Major rewrite of the Storage daemon to: put all drivers in class structures, provide better separation of core/driver code, add new drivers (aligned volumes, cloud), simplifies core code, allows loadable device drivers much like plugins but which are better integrated into the SD.
There are a number of new Bacula Systems whitepapers available on www.bacula.org, and a few more will be coming in the next few months.
New unique message id will be added to every message (designed but not yet implemented).

Core Features

Implement a drive usage counter to do round robin drive assignment.
Enhance functionality of TapeAlert.
Implement a “Perpetual Virtual Full” feature that creates a Virtual Full backup that is updated every day.
Increase Director’s default “Maximum Concurrent Jobs” setting from 1 to 20.
Add “PluginDirectory” by default in bacula-sd.conf and bacula-fd.conf.
Add support for terabytes in sizes. Submitted by Wanderlei Huttel.
Restore mtime & atime for symlinks.
New “status network” command to test the connection and the bandwidth between a Client and a Storage Daemon.
New Tape Alert tracking.
Loadable SD device drivers.
PostgeSQL SSL connections permitted.
JobStatistics improved.
DB update required.
Autochanger improvements to group Devices.
Improved .estimate command.
Comm line compression.
Separate bxxjson programs for Console, Dir, FD, SD to output .conf content in Json for easier reading with programs.
Read Only storage devices

Bconsole Features:

Add “ExpiresIn” field in list and llist media output.
Add command to change the priority of a running job (update jobid=xxx priority=xx).
Add level= and jobtype= parameters to the “list jobs” command.
Add option to bconsole to list and select a specific Console.
Add shortcut to RunScript console commands. Submitted by Wanderlei Huttel.
Display “IgnoreFileSetChanges” in show fileset command (#2107).
Display PrefixLinks in “show job” output.
Display permission bits in .bvfs_decode.
Display the Comment field in “llist job” command.
Add “ActionOnPurge” field to “llist pool” command. Fix #2487
Add “long” keyword to list command, ie “list long job”. This is essentially an alias fo the “llist” command.
Modify the “setbandwidth” limit parameter to accept speed input. ex: limit.
Modify the “setbandwidth” limit parameter so that the default is no longer kb/s but b/s.
Do not show disabled resources in selection list.
Fix bconsole readline and “dumb” terminal handling of CTRL-C.
Add the priority field to the .api 2 job listing output.
Improved restricted consoles when accessing catalog.