Re: [Bacula-users] backup strategy

[Aditya Ivaturi]

>
> Well, right away it's apparent that there's no volumes in your Win-Pool
> (therefore, no appendable volumes); all the volumes in your Lin-pool are
> used (all on the same day), but not recycled -- presumably they have not
> reached their retention date; and all the volumes in your Default pool
> are errored.

Here is what happened when I set up the new configuration. I ran the jobs in Lin-Pool and didn't bother with the Win-Pool as I was expecting it to be finished that night according to schedule. Well bacula started the whole cycle again and started with the Lin-Pool jobs first and the very first job it was waiting for an appendable volume. That is the reason why I don't have any volumes for windows yet.

>
> Bacula is telling you "No appendable volume could be found" because ...
> no appendable volumes exist.
>
> At a guess, you might want to replace that "Use volume once" with a
> "Volume use duration" setting, because I'll bet what happened is your
> system put one job on each of your Lin-pool Volumes the first day you
> ran it, using up every tape in the pool, then had nothing left to put
> the next job on.
>

From the docs for "Volume Use Duration":

"The Volume Use Duration directive defines the time period that the Volume can be written beginning from the time of first data write to the Volume. If the time-period specified is zero (the default), the Volume can be written indefinitely. Otherwise, when the time period from the first write to the volume (the first Job written) exceeds the time-period-specification, the Volume will be marked Used, which means that no more Jobs can be appended to the Volume, but it may be recycled if recycling is enabled."

So if I am understanding it correctly, my config was default i.e "0" which means the volumes should have been used indefinitely until the retention period is reached which is 6 months since it is created (and it has been just 2 days since it was created) and will be again recycled. But instead it has been marked "used", which tells me that somehow the director thinks that time period has exceeded the specified time. And that is the reason director thinks that it cannot write to the volume and is requesting a new volume to append to.

If my analysis is correct, what is going wrong? Or could you please let me know where I comprehended it incorrectly?

--Turi