Installation and Getting Started
BRU LE for Mac OS X is installed as a standard Mac package. Upon receiving either the BRU LE CD or the BRU LE installation disk image file (DMG), installation proceeds as with any other Macintosh product.
If you received BRU LE on CD, insert the CD into your CD/DVD drive and open the volume. Double-click on the "BRU LE for Mac OS X" Installer package and follow the prompts. You will need to authenticate as the admin user for your system to perform the installation.
If you downloaded BRU LE as a DMG file (or received it by some other method), double-click the DMG file to mount it and then open the resulting "BRU LE for Mac OS X" Installer volume. Double-click the package icon as above and continue as directed.
Once the installation completes, the BRU LE, BRUTalk, and BRU LE Uninstaller applications Will be installed in your /Applications folder and the component support files will be installed in /bru and /var/lib/bru. See Appendix A for more information on the files that are installed.
Starting BRU LE
To start BRU user interface, open your Applications folder and double-click the BRU LE for Mac OS X icon to start BRU. Once started, you are instructed to authenticate as the system’s administrative user. This is done to enable BRU to access all of you system’s volumes and data. If you do not authenticate, you will only have permissions necessary to backup your personal data.
Figure 1 – User Authentication Note
Figure 2 - Security Authentication
When you have successfully authenticated, BRU’s startup will take one of two paths. If you do not have a library attached, you will be automatically taken to the Backup panel as shown in Figure 3. If you have a tape library attached to your system, BRU will display a dialog about creating library destinations to allow full access to your library (Figure 4). We will discuss library operations in chapter 3.
Figure 3 – Main Backup Panel
Figure 4 – Library Destination Notice
For now, if you have a library, click Ok and then click the Close button on the Destination creation dialog. Select the Backup tab to return to the main backup display and define and start a backup.
Once the backup panel (figure 3) is displayed, select the main volume and expand it using the disclosure triangle on the left side. Select a sample backup set – for this demo, we’ll use the Applications folder. You may add the Applications folder to the selection listbox in one of 3 ways - you may select the folder and click the "Add" -> "Selected" button, double click on the Applications folder, or drag the Applications folder to the lower listbox. Additionally, you may drag and drop an item from your desktop or Finder™ window.
Figure 5 – Select Paths for Backup
"/Applications/" will appear in the lower listbox. Do the same for the Developer directory (if you haven’t installed the developer tools, you may not have a Developer directory). The Backup panel will look similar to figure 5. Note that whatever appears in the lower list box will be included in the backup run.
If you would like to save this selection as a backup definition that can be reloaded and scheduled. Click "Save Definition" and the Save Definition dialog will appear (figure 6). Enter a descriptive name for this definition and click Save or hit the Enter key.
Figure 6 – Saving a Backup Definition
Once the definition is saved, BRU will ask if you would like to schedule the saved Definition (figure 7). For this demo run, click the No button.
Figure 7 – Definition Saved: Schedule it?
For the backup test, we will use the default tape drive as a standalone tape drive. To start the backup, click the "Start Backup" button. If you haven’t previously loaded a tape, you will be prompted as in figure 8.
Figure 8 - Insert a Tape To Start the Backup
Once the drive is ready, the tape’s header will be read to determine if there is an existing BRU archive on the tape (figure 9).
Figure 9 - Checking for Existing BRU Archive
The label and overwrite dialog will be displayed (Figure 10). Enter a human-readable label in the text entry field. This label may be up to 63 characters long. Also, to estimate the amount of data and number of files processed, select the "Estimate Job" checkbox. You may choose between overwriting and appending the data to the tape. Select the Overwrite option and click the Continue button. If we were using a disk file for this demonstration, these options are disabled and only overwriting is allowed.
Figure 10 – Enter Label and Select Options
If you click the "Do Not Ask Again" checkbox, any additional backup operations performed during this BRU session will use the parameters entered and you will not be asked before the backup process begins. If you’ve selected to estimate the job, the estimate progress window will appear (figure 11).
Figure 11 – Backup Estimate
During the estimate run, you may elect to skip or cancel the estimate. If you skip the estimate pass, the backup will begin, but BRU will not know what the total expected backup size will be. If you cancel the estimate, you will be canceling the actual backup.
Once the estimate is completed, the estimate dialog will go into countdown mode (figure 12). If there is no user input for 30 seconds, BRU assumes that you have left it to complete the procedure and will automatically begin the actual backup pass.
Figure 12 - Estimate Countdown
After clicking the Continue button, the estimation pass will be run and the progress will be displayed as shown in figure 10. Once the estimate pass completes, you can click the Continue button or wait 30 seconds and the backup process will begin automatically.
Figure 13 – Backup Running
As the backup runs, progress will be displayed as show in figure 13. The Progress Bar immediately underneath the filename provides progress info on larger files. If you did not select the estimate pass, the progress bar displayed at the bottom of the dialog will be the barber pole rather than the solid blue progress bar. This is because BRU does not know how much data will be processed during the backup process.
Additionally, if you uncheck the "Display Details" checkbox, only the progress bar will be displayed. Displaying the details during archive I/O can negatively impact backup and verify speed on systems with large numbers of small files – such as a mail or newsgroup server.
Once the backup completes, the verify process will occur (figure 14). The verify process is automatic unless you uncheck the "AutoScan Verify" checkbox in the Backup Option frame before you start the backup process. Please remember that a verification pass is the only way to determine if the data that you think was backed up was actually backed up!
Figure 14 - Verify Running
You may abort the backup or verify process by clicking the "Abort Backup" or "Abort Verify" button.
Figure 15 – Backup and Verify Completed Successfully
Once the backup and verify are completed, the progress window will inform you as shown in figure 15.
If all went as expected, you have now completed your first backup using BRU LE for Mac OS X.
Click the Close button to return to the main backup window.
Restoring Data
Now that we have backed up some data, it’s time to restore it. Click on the Restore tab and the Restore panel will be displayed. At this stage, only the backup you just performed will be visible in the Archives table.
Figure 16 - Retrieving the Archive Catalog List for Restore
Select the archive by clicking its label text and BRU will load the archive catalog (Figure 16).
Figure 17 – Rename File to Be Restored
For our test restore, we will restore the "Calculator" in the /Applications folder. Once the archive contents are loaded, open a Finder window and select the Applications folder. Within the Applications folder, locate "Calculator" and rename it to "Calculator Original" as shown in figure 17.
Return to BRU and click the Search button on the right side of the Restore panel.
The Search dialog will display as in figure 18.
Figure 18 - Searching the Restore List
Enter "Calculator" (without the quotes) in the text field, check the "Select Only First Match" checkbox and click search (or hit the Enter key).
The first entry for "Calculator.app" will be selected and it will be added to the Selected table as shown in figure 19 below.
Figure 19 - Calculator.app selected for restore
As the final step, click the Restore button and wait. BRU will automatically position the tape to the proper offset and begin the restore. Depending upon the type of tape drive in use, the positioning should take a few seconds to 45 or so seconds before the restore begins. While this isn’t an amazing timesaving on our small test backup, if the backup consisted of 100’s of gigabytes, the backup operation could have taken hours to perform. Our Quick File Access (QFA) implementation allows you to restore selected files in a much shorter timeframe. Average tape positioning times can range from 90 seconds on a DDS4 DAT tape to just under 4 minutes on an LTO 3 - much quicker than the hours that a non-QFA enabled app would require to restore the same files.
As the restore progresses, the Restore Progress dialog will display the files as they are processed. During the restore, you may abort the operation by clicking on the "Abort Restore" button. The file currently being restored will finish and the remainder of the selected data will not be restored. Once completed, simply click the "Close" button (or hit Enter) – figure 20.
Figure 20 – Restore Completed Successfully
To see the result of our restore test, return to the previous Finder window and you will see both "BRU Library Manager Original" and "BRU Library Manager" (which we just restored).
When restoring data on an OS X system it is important to realize that even though BRU processes applications as folders, we recommend that you only restore complete top-level .app folders (many OS X Applications are really folders designed to operate as a single application) or the resulting restore could leave an application in a non-functioning state.
Since we renamed the existing "Calculator" application, BRU restored the version from the archive completely. If we had not renamed the original app, BRU would not have overwritten the existing file(s) since the files in the archive were the same age as the files on the disk. The three checkbox options to "Overwrite Existing Files" will provide control over which files will be overwritten. BRU’s default is to only overwrite if the files do not exist on the drive, or if the files in the archive are newer than the files on the disk.
