Starting with Bareos 21 (released on December 22, 2021), our Open Source backup solution no longer supports MySQL as Bareos catalog database. It has been marked as deprecated since Bareos 19.2, and in Bareos 20, it was only available when updating existing installations.
Bareos 21 now only supports one database backend: PostgreSQL. Since SQL queries no longer have to be compatible with different database backends, i.e. MySQL/MariaDB and PostgreSQL, existing queries can now be optimized for PostgreSQL. Consequently, SQL queries can be more flexible and a lot quicker.
New Bareos installations use PostgreSQL as default, and for existing MySQL catalogs, Bareos 20 offers bareos-dbcopy to migrate existing databases.
bareos-dbcopy has been a part of Bareos since version 19.2.5. It converts the Bareos catalog database from MySQL/MariaDB to PostgreSQL. It copies the data of all tables from a source to a destination catalog. bareos-dbcopy uses the Bareos Director configuration to load the catalog settings. Also, it needs a configuration resource for both catalog databases, the source (MySQL/MariaDB) and the destination (PostgreSQL).
First, bareos-dbcopy scans both databases for existing tables/columns. Then it transfers each row from the source to the destination database. Depending on the column type, it will apply data filters. Tables which only exists in the source database, but not in the destination database, will be skipped. If a destination table already contains data, it is ignored as well.
With Bareos 21, we’ve announced End of Life for MySQL. In short, if you haven’t migrated the Bareos catalog yet, please do so now before the upgrade to Bareos 21. Are you running a previous version of Bareos and still rely on MySQL as catalog database? Then upgrade to Bareos 20 first. In Bareos 20, you can migrate the catalog to PostgreSQL using the bareos-dbcopy tool. For more information, please read the HOWTO in your documentation.