After some occasional experiments with Bacula, I finally started reading the
manual (my printed version is for 1.36.0) page by page, my goal being to set
up a decently working backup strategy instead of occasional backups.
So far, my idea is roughly the following:
- pool of 12 tapes, each of which should have a capacity for a one full
backup, plus appr. 20 incrementals or deltas
- nominally, the next tape would be taken into use in the beginning of every
month
Reasons behind this are minimal manual handling of the tapes, knowing there
will be loss of up to one month's data if the current tape gets destroyed. I
believe my tape drive (Exabyte VXA-2) could handle this.
What makes things complicated (afaik), is that I wouldn't like to obey too
strictly the schedule "new tape on the every 1st day of month". If I know in
advance I'll be a few days out of the office, I propably would change the
tape in advance -or late. Neither want I have a situation that the tape
fills up, but it normally must be changed before this. Manual ("going to
vacation") shows a way to handle this, marking the tape "full" or "used"
manually, so the recycling allows re-using the oldest tape although the
previous one wasn't written full yet.
- what is the command required to manually mark tape as "used"?
I would find it extremely handy, that every tape would always *start* with a
full backup, followed by a set of incrementals and deltas. However, this
conflicts with the strict schedule above. What would be the most simple way
to "synchronize" the backup schedule with the tape change? I mean, always in
the night right after changing the tape (which would *not* happen exactly to
pre-set schedule) a full backup would be run, followed by regular
day-of-week based series of incremental and delta backups in the following
nights (which would go on indefinitely, in practice up to eg. 25-40 calendar
days or 20-30 nightly backups) until the tape would be changed again.
Easy way would be to manually run full backup job, and accept the extra
incremental to run the same night afterwards (set to run with lower
priority). However, this doesn't sound nice to me. Any idea how to handle
this without too many console commands? I think occasionally I still had to
delegate this to somebody else, with little experience of maintenance tasks,
that's why the easy way would be a must... If a better way does not exist,
is there possibly any scripting language available in the console, so the
novice operator could call a more complex pre-written script by a single
console command?
Finally, provided I get everything else working as planned, are there any
special risks related to reconstructing the catalog with the bscan command
after a disaster? Since this way all I would ever need for a disaster
recovery would be just a single (the most recent) tape, I'm wondering if
there were no actual need to keep separate catalog backups or bootstrap
files?
--
TiN
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