Professional Support

If you need professional support, please see the professional support page of this website.

Community Support

Please keep in mind that no one is getting paid for this. Nevertheless, our desire is to see as many people using Bacula as possible. A number of very knowledgeable volunteers are willing to provide a reasonable level of email support. Before asking for help, please read the Information Needed listed below, and it could be useful to check against the email archive as often solution to your problem has been discussed or a patch has been released.

Also, if you are using Bacula in production, we highly recommend subscribing to the bugs database to keep informed of problems and patches. You might also want to look for professional support.

Please do not submit support requests to the bugs database. For more information on bugs, please see the Bugs page on this web site.

For community support, send an email to bacula-users at lists.sourceforge.net, and if you are specific enough, some kind Bacula user will help you. Please note that if you don’t at least specify what version of Bacula and what platform you are using, it will not be easy to get a valid answer. The email address noted above was modified to prevent easy use by spammers. To use it, you must replace the at with an @ symbol. Due to the increasing volumes of spam on the list, you must be subscribed to it to be able to send and email to it. The link Email Lists provides links to where you can subscribe to each of the Bacula email lists. The users constantly monitor this list and will generally provide support. Please see Information Needed below for what to include in your support request. If you don’t supply the necessary information, it will take longer to respond to your request, and users may be afraid to try to respond, if your request is too complicated or not well formulated.

I (Kern) get a number of “off-list” emails sent directly to me. Unfortunately, I am no longer able to provide direct user support. However, I do read all the email sent and occasionally provide a tip or two. If you do send email to me, please always copy the appropriate list, if you do not copy the list, I may not answer you, or I will answer by copying the list. If you really have something confidential, please clearly indicate it.

Please do not send general support requests to the bacula-devel list. You may send a preliminary bug question, a development question, or minor enhancement request to the bacula-devel list. If you do not provide the information requested below, particularly the Bacula version, it is frustrating for us, because it is quite often the case that your problem is version dependent, and possibly already fixed. In such case, we will note the problem, but you will be unlikely to get a response, especially if we are busy, because it forces us to first ask you what version you are using (or other information), then deal with your response, thus doubling the time for us. If we do ask you for information, please include all the previous correspondence in each email, to avoid us having to search the archives to find what you previously wrote. In short, if you want a response, please see “Information Needed” below.

If you are looking for live-support you might check out our irc-channel in the Freenode net, called #bacula.

Information Needed

For us to respond to a bug report, we normally need the following as the minimum information, which you can enter into the appropriate fields of the bug reporting system:

  • Your operating system
  • The version of Bacula you are using
  • A clear and concise description of the problem
  • If you say “it crashes”, “it doesn’t work” or something similar, you should include some output from Bacula that shows this.
  • If we respond to your email, and you answer, possibly supplying more information, please be sure to include the full text of previous emails so that we have all the information in one place.

If you are having tape problems, please include:

  • The kind of tape drive you have
  • Have you run the btape “test” command?

If you are having database problems, please include:

  • The database you are using: MySQL, PostgreSQL, SQLite, SQLite3
  • The version of the database you are using

The first two of these items can be fulfilled by sending us a copy of your config.out file, which is in the main Bacula source directory after you have done your ./configure. In addition, we will sometimes need a copy of your Bacula configuration files (especially bacula-dir.conf). If you think it is a configuration problem, please don’t hesitate to send them if necessary.
Please read that little Bug-Report-HowTo as well.