Hello.
Daniel Bloemer wrote:
Hi,
for the last week I have checked out bacula, since I need to replace the mt-scripts here with a better solution.
Nice to see you found bacula.
I have done several testing and reading in the documentation and what I have found out is quite promising. But I have some open questions. Maybe someone here with more experience in bacula can answer some of that.
I'm quite sure... although recently there was some discussion of how a backup routine should work, especially regarding tape management.
Thus you get some sort of disclaimer ;-)
I think that a backup system should avoid overwriting anything which is not definitely "old". Old means that the operator decided - either at setup time or by giving the right commands - that it can be overwritten. Nothing gets overwritten when the stored data is considered recent but the volume is the one in the drive.
Volumes are only managed by the backup system. Once you decide you can trust it you have to trust it.
This is - surprise! - the way I use bacula.
The general situation is a lot of data, distributed on several Linux/Windows-hosts, are to be backuped on tape.
For now I have a seagate tape-drive with 20GB capacity, which tapes has to be changed manually.
Short on money?
From personal experience: Better buy a used tape drive or changer with the right capacity for your purpose than take the risk to accidentially destroy backups or "forget" them. YMMV
Some of the backupjobs are bigger than that. It there a way to convince bacula to deal with this properly?
No convincing necessary, bacula does so by default.
I would expect something like:
Starting a fulldump on the first tape until it is full, and then start with a incremental backup of the contents of the first tape followed by full backup of the remainung data until everything is on the tapes.
You get something different:
A full backup starts, fills the tape, requests the next tape, and continues. To my knowledge, this can not (easily) be changed, unless you speak C/C++ fluently and read baculas source code during your bus ride to work ;-)
I have tested to do a fullbackup over several tapes and then starting incremental, which is quite unsatifiing since it takes up to 6 hours to write one tape and I can run just one tape per day. So there is a lot of change in the data in the time the backup runs. Spooling the data to a holding-disc helps me to keep the tape-contents consistent, but it doesn't solve the problem at all.
Ok, I assumeyou're a customer :-)
The following is free of charge, though :-)
The possible solutions:
Best solution: Buy a fitting tape drive or, probably better, an autochanger.
Second best: Use a big spooling disk and schedule your backups so you can do two tape changes a day - one in the morning, one in the afternoon. Six hours per tape should allow this with "normal" working hours.
Third possible solution: Stage the backups in a way that no job is bigger than 20G, and then, for example, have each weekday run one full (actually partly) dump and the other parts do their incrementals.
The second major question is how to bundle jobs. I also have several small jobs. I could schedule everyone of them to a single time, but this would cause the tape-drive to be started several times with a lot of rewinding. I would like to avoid this by scheduling several jobs as a bundle. Is that possible?
Yes. Either simply start all jobs at the same time, spool them to disk, and bacula will work without rewinding the tape (Actually, bacula itself only rewinds the tape at unmount, not between jobs).
Or, if the jobs come from the same client (unlikely) combine them into one fileset. Or use a run before job script to collect the data locally, which is something I wouldn't recommend.
Or, probably the cleanest solution, wait for a future version of bacula :-)
I'm not absolutely sure, but to my knowledge Kern works on the ability to have one job start another, possibly different job, and this might do what you need.
Arno
Thanks in advance.
Regards
Daniel Bloemer
-- IT-Service Lehmann [EMAIL PROTECTED] Arno Lehmann http://www.its-lehmann.de
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