After much thought, I think the best solution for my needs is to have all full and incremental backups saved to disk volumes my large drive for fast backups and convenient restores. In addition, I would like a weekly full backups of all systems stored on tape so that it can be taken offsite.
>From what I can tell, there are the following ways to do this: 1. Do full backups and incremental backups to disk each week. Also, have an additional weekly job to do full backups to tape. Thus, each system is getting a full backup twice a week. Advantage is that this would work and solve my needs. Drawback is that additional network and system load is necessary for two full backups each week. 2. Do full backups and incremental backups to disk each week. Use bacula's migration feature to move the full backups to tape. Advantage is that only one full backup of each client is done each week, saving network and system resources. Disadvantage is that the full backups are no longer available on disk, so doing a restore requires both the tapes and disks to be available. 3. Do full backups and incremental backups to disk each week. Have an additional job to backup the full backup volumes from the big drive to tape. Advantages are that this would work and solve my needs without requiring additional network and system resources. Disadvantage is that restoring from tape (if the drive failed) would be a two step process -- restore the bacula disk volumes, then restore from the disk volumes. 4. After looking through the bacula guide, I came across the bcopy tool and thought that maybe it might be a solution. This would allow me to do normal backups to disk. Then copy the full backup volumes to another device. Advantages are that it solves my needs without requiring additional network and system resources. Disadvantage is that it would probably involve some serious scripting and "hacking" to get it working right. See here for details on the bcopy tool: http://bacula.org/rel-manual/Volume_Utility_Tools.html#SECTION003980000000000000000 So, my question is, does bacula have a way to do what bcopy does? If so, how do I configure it? If not, how do I learn more about bcopy? I've read the entire section on it, however I'm still unclear on some things: a. Does bacula-sd have to be shut down to use bcopy? b. When bcopy is used, do new jobs and files get added to the mysql database? c. Can I restore from both the disk volume or the bcopy'ed tape volume using regular bacula commands, or is the bcopy'ed volume not available in bacula? d. How would I go about creating a bacula job and the necessary scripts that would use bcopy to find all full volumes and copy them from disk to tape? Even though option #3 has some drawbacks, the likelihood of those drawbacks happening are slim, especially if I mirror my big backup drive. I'm leaning toward it at the moment unless someone can suggest a way to make a COPY of a volume from one device to another device, perhaps using bcopy or some other technique available to bacula. Thanks for any help, suggestions, or references to resources that anyone can provide! Tauren ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier. Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
