Kern Sibbald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > The only part of this implementation that I have not worked out > in my head is how to deal with the catalog. If there are two > identical backups of a Job on two different Volumes, the Director > is not currently aware of it. There needs to be some way of > flagging two copies as being identical, then using only one of > those copies for any given restore. Also, there needs to be a > bit more work in implementing some better user interface for > "archiving" i.e. taking Volumes (possible identical copies) out > of the Volume pool, and then later re-introducing them.
Forgive my ignorance if this is a stupid post, because I'm not a developer and don't even have the software rolled out in a production environment yet. Every time that I have read a list post about this type of feature, the word "exported" keeps popping into my mind. Is the holy grail of this whole process simply to define a status of "exported" in the catalog to these second media copies and not using them in any full/diff/incremental backup decisions? In my particular case (and I suspect it's the same for others as well), I need to send disaster recovery tapes to an off-site location. Getting those tapes back can take 2-3 days, hence calling them "exported" and needing to keep a local copy for non-disaster use. As far as the catalog goes, it is more important that those "exported" tapes be off-site than it is to have a nice list of their contents locally, although having both would be nice even though the "exported" copies should never be used in a restore operation decision either unless it was as a last resort. The only time that those tapes would ever really be used would be in the event of a smouldering crater where our server farm used to be, so scanning a tape to re-populate the catalog would probably be happening anyway...on new hardware. :-) Here's an idea that I came up with the other day that may be a Q&D solution. Is it possible to add either an internal or external "bexport" function to Bacula that uses the existing Bacula backup/restore code in a pipeline? What I was thinking was to run a normal backup, and then have "bexport" use the restore code in Bacula to read the catalogged media as if it were doing a restore, massage the restored files in a pipe, and then re-write them onto another volume/device as if it were a new backup. It would be generating a new backup volume by doing this, and differing media sizes between the two devices wouldn't be an issue because it's essentially writing a new backup. In the case of disk-based backups, it might be extremely useful to perform a virtual full restore onto the exported tapes, letting "bexport" make one volume for export that is essentially a "full" backup generated from the different full/diff/incrementals on disk. If adding an "exported" tape status is too much, the Q&D solution using existing code might be as simple as adding a second system definition to the config file to use as a target for this "exported" backup (copy), which might in itself solve many of the other problems trying to keep multiple pools of a single system's backup. My goal is to cut tape copies of our nightly disk backups once per week for exporting to an off-site location, and building these backups during the business day from overnight backups isn't a problem. If a "bexport" utility could be developed that would combine all of the full/diff/incremental backups in the catalog onto one pseudo "full" backup tape volume by using the restore code, one could even get away with running *real* full backups only a few times per year. Anyway, I hope that this is a useful suggestion, and that I'm not beating a dead horse that's already been ruled out or has some serious logic flaw... -Arthur ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by: Power Architecture Resource Center: Free content, downloads, discussions, and more. http://solutions.newsforge.com/ibmarch.tmpl _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
