Updating Bareos
In most cases, a Bareos update is simply done by a package update of the distribution. Please remind, that Bareos Director and Bareos Storage Daemon must always have the same version. The version of the File Daemon may differ, see chapter about backward compatibility.
Updating the configuration files
When updating Bareos through the distribution packaging mechanism, the existing configuration kept as they are.
If you don’t want to modify the behavior, there is normally no need to modify the configuration.
However, in some rare cases, configuration changes are required. These cases are described in the Release Notes.
It is generally sufficient, to upgrade to the latest release, without having to install any intermediate releases (however, it is required to read the release notes of all intermediate releases).
One exception is when using a MySQL Bareos catalog. The MySQL backend support has been removed in Bareos Version >= 21.0.0. Therefore you first have to upgrade to Bareos 20 and migrate the MySQL into a PostgreSQL Bareos Catalog, see Migrate a Bareos Catalog from MySQL to PostgreSQL.
With Bareos version >= 16.2.4 the default configuration uses the Subdirectory Configuration Scheme.
This scheme offers various improvements. However, if your are updating from earlier versions, your existing single configuration files (/etc/bareos/bareos-*.conf) stay in place and are contentiously used by Bareos.
The new default configuration resource files will also be installed (/etc/bareos/bareos-*.d/*/*.conf).
However, they will only be used, when the legacy configuration file does not exist.
See Updates from Bareos < 16.2.4 for details and how to migrate to Subdirectory Configuration Scheme.
Updating the database scheme
Sometimes improvements in Bareos make it necessary to update the database scheme.
Warning
If the Bareos catalog database does not have the current schema, the Bareos Director refuses to start.
Detailed information can then be found in the log file /var/log/bareos/bareos.log.
Take a look into the Release Notes to see which Bareos updates do require a database scheme update.
Warning
Especially the upgrade to Bareos >= 17.2.0 restructures the File database table. In larger installations this is very time consuming (up to several hours or days) and temporarily doubles the amount of required database disk space.
Debian based Linux Distributions
Since Bareos Version >= 14.2.0 the Debian (and Ubuntu) based packages support the dbconfig-common mechanism to create and update the Bareos database. If this is properly configured, the database schema will be automatically adapted by the Bareos packages.
For details see dbconfig-common (Debian).
If you disabled the usage of dbconfig-common, follow the instructions for Other Platforms.
Other Platforms
This has to be done as database administrator. On most platforms Bareos knows only about the credentials to access the Bareos database, but not about the database administrator credentials to modify the database schema.
The task of updating the database schema is done by the script /usr/lib/bareos/scripts/update_bareos_tables.
However, this script requires administration access to the database. Depending on your distribution and your database, this requires different preparations. More details can be found in chapter Catalog Maintenance.
Warning
If you’re updating from Bareos <= 13.2.3 and have configured the Bareos database during install using Bareos environment variables (db_name, db_user or db_password, see Catalog Maintenance), make sure to have these variables defined in the same way when calling the update and grant scripts. Newer versions of Bareos read these variables from the Director configuration. However, make sure that the user running the database scripts has read access to this file (or set the environment variables). The postgres user normally does not have the required permissions.
su postgres -c /usr/lib/bareos/scripts/update_bareos_tables
su postgres -c /usr/lib/bareos/scripts/grant_bareos_privileges
The grant_bareos_privileges command is required, if new databases tables are introduced. It does not hurt to run it multiple times.
After this, restart the Bareos Director and verify it starts without problems.