Kern Sibbald wrote: > On Wednesday 24 August 2005 20:34, Ryan Novosielski wrote: > >>What I want is for >>bacula to use the tape with the lowest ID that is writable. I definite >>writable as any volume that is in a state that will allow it to be >>written to (including a tape that contains data but whose retention time >>has passed). I have 11 daily tapes, and after my full backup, I want >>tape #1 to be used. However, Bacula often wants tape 10 or 11 as they >>did not get used during the last cycle at all. If I want the drive to >>take tape 1, I have to disable the higher numbered tapes. >> >>Is there a way to do what I want without scripting? It's not readily >>apparent.
It sounds like you want to replace Bacula's tape selection algorithm (which is probably roughly "which of the usable tapes in the pool has the oldest 'last used' date?") with one that says "Which of the usable tapes in the pool has the lowest id?". I'm not quite sure what you mean by "id", but let's assume you mean 'label'. Also, since you talk about doing this for your daily tapes after a full backup, I assume your "daily tapes" form a pool used for incremental or differential backups. In a later email you talk about "recycling all recyclable volumes". Bacula does this already. What I think you meant was "recycle (or even purge?) all volumes in the incremental/differential pool after a full backup has taken place", effectively wiping out your incremental/differential pool once you've got a full backup onto tape. It might sound like a good idea (and certainly makes it easy to know which tape to put in next), but really you're best off letting bacula decide which tape to use next. The tape selection algorithm it has should ensure that at any one time, you can make best use of the data on your backup tapes. If you purge a tape several days before you reuse it, then you can't make use of the data for those few days - sounds a bit silly, really... (well you can, if you bscan it in, but let's assume bscan is for disaster recovery only). If you want to implement your tape selection strategy, then, well, Bacula is open source, go ahead and edit away :) It might even be an idea to allow tape selection strategy to be pluggable (perhaps using the python interface?), although I doubt Kern'll feel like implementing it. He may well accept a patch to do so, however... Basically, your idea for tape selection doesn't agree with the way bacula does things. You might be able to fudge it using a runafterjob on your full backups (to purge all incremental/differential tapes, shouldn't be hard to do - think sqlquery, update media set status=something where ..., and then run a prune volumes or something), but ultimately you are probably better off with using the retention schema bacula's trying to get you to use! -- Russell Howe [EMAIL PROTECTED] ------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is Sponsored by the Better Software Conference & EXPO September 19-22, 2005 * San Francisco, CA * Development Lifecycle Practices Agile & Plan-Driven Development * Managing Projects & Teams * Testing & QA Security * Process Improvement & Measurement * http://www.sqe.com/bsce5sf _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
