Kern Sibbald wrote:
> Hello,
>
> A general comment: perhaps I am wrong, but it seems to me that the scheme you
> are using for backups (one Volume for each day) is virtually guaranteed to
> cause a catastrophe if there is a disk error. The reason is that you have
> *all* Wednesdays in a single volume. If you loose that volume, you loose
> *all* Wednesdays you cannot even backup to a previous week.
>
> You might want to take a look at the example in the manual, which is probably
> not perfect, but unless I am mistaken, is much more error tolerant.
>
> See comments below:
>
>
>> Dear Collegues,
>>
>> I use Bacula 1.36.3 with one usb hard disk which is 400 GB in large. I
>> have configured Bacula in such way I have 5 archives incremented daily
>> during whole year. All mondays are stored in one file -Monday, tuesdays
>> - in Tuesday etc. and are incremented since 1 January. Now they are
>> about 20GB each. There are also month backups, but they are made once a
>> two months now (because of the amount of space taken).
>>
>> Yesterday I had a power failure and just after I forgot to switch on the
>> drive. Because there was no drive mounted, Bacula changed VolStatus from
>> "Append" to "Error".
>>
>> Now I have the following problem: when I try to restore files, the error
>> volume is ommited, and I cannot restore none of the wednesday's backups.
>>
>
> Unfortunately, you have not included all the output below, so I am not sure
> what option you used in the main menu. Assuming it was option 5, Bacula
> should include all Volumes that are needed regardless of their status.
> However, it will not include any Job that terminated with an error status.
>
>
>> When I manually set the VolStatus to "Append" I still cannot restore
>> wednesdays, because size of the volume is zero.
>>
>
> I would be interested to know how you conclude this as to the best of my
> knowledge Bacula does not explicitly check the volume size. If the volume
> size is zero, it is most likely because it has been deleted (Bacula will not
> delete volumes) or it is not properly mounted, which can easily happen with
> USB drives.
>
> I recommend that you read the Restore chapter. It goes through nearly all the
> points I have made and a lot more.
>
>> Restore output with missing wednesdays:
>>
>
> In general, I see no problem here because Bacula will select only Volumes
> that
> have necessary data on them. You haven't shown any indication from the
> catalog that any Job ran on Wednesday, and even if one did, as long as all
> the files were backed up later, there would be no need for Wednesday's data.
> If the last day you are restoring to is Tuesday, with your scheme, there
> would
> also be no need for Wednesday's data.
>
> In addition, I see no Volumes listed for Friday ...
>
>
>> Select FileSet resource (1-3): 2
>> +-------+-------+----------+---------------------+------------+-----------+
>> --------------+----------------+
>>
>> | JobId | Level | JobFiles | StartTime | VolumeName |
>>
>> StartFile | VolSessionId | VolSessionTime |
>> +-------+-------+----------+---------------------+------------+-----------+
>> --------------+----------------+
>>
>> | 422 | F | 1,267 | 2006-02-23 21:00:04 | Month |
>>
>> 0 | 22 | 1,140,553,788 |
>>
>> | 435 | I | 10 | 2006-02-24 20:00:04 | Week |
>>
>> 4 | 10 | 1,140,774,306 |
>>
>> | 460 | I | 10 | 2006-02-27 20:00:04 | Monday |
>>
>> 4 | 6 | 1,141,030,874 |
>>
>> | 470 | I | 119 | 2006-02-28 20:00:04 | Tuesday |
>>
>> 3 | 15 | 1,141,030,874 |
>>
>> | 490 | I | 102 | 2006-03-02 20:00:04 | Thursday |
>>
>> 2 | 29 | 1,141,030,874 |
>>
>> | 500 | I | 43 | 2006-03-03 20:00:04 | Week |
>>
>> 4 | 38 | 1,141,030,874 |
>>
>> | 510 | I | 10 | 2006-03-06 20:00:04 | Monday |
>>
>> 4 | 8 | 1,141,629,243 |
>>
>> | 515 | I | 9 | 2006-03-07 20:00:04 | Tuesday |
>>
>> 3 | 13 | 1,141,629,243 |
>> +-------+-------+----------+---------------------+------------+-----------+
>> --------------+----------------+ You have selected the following JobIds:
>> 422,435,460,470,490,500,510,515
>>
>> Building directory tree for JobId 422 ...
>> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>> Building directory tree for JobId 435 ... +
>> Building directory tree for JobId 460 ...
>> Building directory tree for JobId 470 ...
>> Building directory tree for JobId 490 ... +
>> Building directory tree for JobId 500 ...
>> Building directory tree for JobId 510 ...
>> Building directory tree for JobId 515 ...
>> 8 Jobs, 1,272 files inserted into the tree.
>> ...
>>
>>
>> What shall I do now? I've considered to use bscan -s against the volume
>> but I am not sure if it would not damage the Catalog. Besides the
>> archive is compressed with BZIP9 option and the media is slow, so I
>> would rather use some hack to get my Catalog in line with real data
>> stored on disk.
>>
>> I would really appreciate any help.
>>
>> Janusz
>>
>>
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>
>
Well that is true, I know that in case lost of a file I will have no
backup. But I use linux capabilities, which grants that even root cannot
delete file without special acitions (chattr -a) . The second thing is
I copy the disk onto the other 400 gb usb disk (once a week, cron job is
to remind me and my colegue loudly in case I forget) , so I have also
unplugged copy of the data :-) Yes, the Friday is missing because it is
named Week...
Yes, I used option 5 which provides the most recent backup. But the job
I really do is not exactly backup'ing data, but archiving so I have to
be sure that I can restore for EACH day in the past. I know that I could
restore for a day before and day after, but what about all Wednesdays?
still couldn't find a file which existed ONLY during Wednesday.
Hmm... Bacula haven't deleted a file, of course. But as I remember from
some of my previous test, isn't it going to truncate it and start
writing form the beginning? or it will append to the file but the
Catalog will know nothing about previous jobs?
* Exactly that situation occurs: listing jobs SHOWS Wednesday jobs,
but I cannot find them in restore jobs. The disk is mounted and the file
exists. I marked it "append *(hey! I'm linux admin for 3 years
and have got Bacula for a 2-3 years without a problem :-) and was
sucessfully backuping/restoring a lot of different servers to tapes,
disk and so on :-)).
Maybe it's the thing that Bacula tried to write to a file which wasn't
there yesterday: it created a short file and - surprisingly - named it
Wednesday. When I mounted usb disk the file was simply changed for a
proper one.
Well - because I have permanent shortage of disk space I will perform
the Wednesday backup in Wednesday, then I'll answer about trucating.
Now I'm not satisfied as the questions remains open.
Janusz
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