Protecting customer data on their workstation and laptop is very essential. Most of the uncommitted valuable data reside in Laptops and Desktops. Most Organizations protect the endpoints using regular backups and recover the data in no time in case of hardware failures or accidental deletion. This article will walk you through how to install and configure the BBA agent on Linux endpoints and configure the backup job in BDRSuite. BDRSuite supports Linux, Windows, and Mac endpoints. It also supports backup data encryption to secure the data. A flexible scheduling option and uninterrupted backup jobs make BDRSuite stand out from the market.
In my current LAB environment, I have BDRSuite 5.3.0.1 which is generally available for use. I have CentOS Linux VM which has been quickly bootstrapped using Vagrant/Virtualbox.
[root@webapp1 ~]# df -h
Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
devtmpfs 912M 0 912M 0% /dev
tmpfs 919M 0 919M 0% /dev/shm
tmpfs 919M 8.5M 911M 1% /run
tmpfs 919M 0 919M 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/sda1 40G 4.2G 36G 11% /
tmpfs 184M 0 184M 0% /run/user/0
[root@webapp1 ~]# cat /etc/redhat-release
CentOS Linux release 7.9.2009 (Core)
[root@webapp1 ~]#
[root@webapp1 ~]# ifconfig eth1
eth1: flags=4163<UP,BROADCAST,RUNNING,MULTICAST> mtu 1500
inet 172.16.16.31 netmask 255.255.255.0 broadcast 172.16.16.255
inet6 fe80::a00:27ff:fe95:4bcb prefixlen 64 scopeid 0x20<link>
ether 08:00:27:95:4b:cb txqueuelen 1000 (Ethernet)
Here is the prerequisite for the Linux endpoints to protect using BDRSuite backup.
BDRSuite – Backup Repository configuration:
1. Login to BDRSuite to validate the backup repository.
2. Click on the block storage configuration. You could also create the backup repository using object storage.
3. Here is my simple backup repository for testing the Linux VM backup and recovery.
BDRSuite – Configure Linux endpoint Backup:
Let’s add the Linux endpoint to the BDRSuite and perform the backup.
1. Login to the BDRSuite console and navigate to the endpoint tab.
2. Click on “Data Sources” and click on “Add Linux”.
3. Enter the IP address or FQDN of the backup client and add the credentials to install the agent automatically.
4. BDRsuite provides the option to choose the user account or Linux private key.
5. Click OK to proceed. If you want to install the BBA agent manually, you can refer to the KB article which is provided in the wizard.
6. Here is the BBA agent installation progress. In the backend, BDRSuite copies the BBA agent to the endpoint and performs the installation. For the Linux endpoint, the Perl package must be installed prior to adding the client.
7. Once the installation is completed and connected to the client, you will get the idle status like below. We have successfully installed BBA agent on CentOS 7 and added the endpoint to the BDRSuite.
BDRSuite – Configure Linux endpoint Backup:
1. Navigate to the “Backup” tab. Click on configure backup – > Linux.
2. Enter the job name and select the backup repository.
3. Select the Linux – CentOS endpoint to configure the backup.
4. Select the files and folders to add to the backup rotation. For testing purposes, I have added only /tmp and /var filesystems.
5. The next section helps you to configure the desired backup schedule for the endpoints. You can choose incremental backup and full backup schedules. You can also set the expiry date for the backup in the Advanced settings.
6. Here is the options to configure the backup retention.
7. BDRSuite supports data encryption.
8. Review the BDRsuite Backup configuration for the endpoints. To check the BDRSuite’s timezone settings, click on “Backup Server” -> “Timezone”.
Once you have saved the job, BDRsuite will trigger the backup job on the configured window. Download BDRsuite for free to experience the product in your real environment.