[snipped for your sanity]
This machine will be running in a remote location and unfortunately we
won't have access to change tapes on our own, and due to cost reasons an
autoloader is currently out of the question. What I need to be able to do
is use the two drives to keep backups of files on the server, but only
for recovering files in the event of accidental deletion and drive
failure.
Then you hope that your tapes never break and the drives and nothing burns
etc... well, of course you must work with what you have, but you should
consider doing a backup to another location. In my opinion.
The data is held on a Raid5 disk set with an automatic hot swap replacement
disk, the disk is also mirrored every evening over the network to another
machine, but I also want to keep a tape backup too. If a tape breaks then it
is a 3 hour drive to visit the machine which is fine for a borken tape, I
just dont want to have to do that for every tape swap. Because of the amount
of data, the mirroring to disk every evening will be a pure mirror, i.e no
history, so really the tape is only if someone deletes some files and fails
to tell me about it until the following day etc.....
[snipped]
Well, the easiest way would be to set up a pool with two volumes and set
Recycle oldest volume (when your retention periods fit) or purge oldes
volume (if you _know_ your setup is right).
This will probably not work because you can't tell bacula to select the
right one of two available drives.
So, I guess you have to setup a schedule that does what you want - in the
easiest case just set the months jan, mar, may, jul, sep, nov to use one
storage, and the others use the other one.
Yes, this is looking like the likely solution, and I guess I should be able
to achieve this using the current version of bacula no problems. It just
gets complicated when the amount of data increases that I need to backup and
I have to start reducing the tape switchover point to 15 days, and not per
month in order to keep the full set and incrementals onto a single tape.
Rewriting the backup schedules seems a lot more complicated than dropping
the max volumes per job value.
Is there ultimately going to be support for multiple drives without the need
to switch tapes. e.g What if I had 16 backup drives all loaded with single
tapes. Will that allow me to maintain a proper 16 tape rotation without the
need for tape reloading for either backups or restores.
P.S. I know this kinda defeats one of the main purposes of having tape based
backups, in that the tapes can be removed offsite once completed.
I realise work is ongoing with the dual drive system, but the
documentation all seems geared for autoloaders when dealing with multiple
drives.
That shouldn't matter too much - imagine an autoloader where only one tape
is available :-)
Yes, I hadn't thought of that :)
Graham
Arno
Kind regards
Graham Wharton
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