On Wednesday 05 December 2007 8:46:24 am Damian Brasher wrote: > Thanks, this has started off last night missed jobs, however I have this > message and still do not fully understand why the tape moves to the end > of the last backup instead of starting from the beginning of the tape...
I think it's because the volume is appendable, and bacula generally tries to avoid purging volumes as long as it can avoid doing so. That's a part of the design philosophy even though it's counter-intuitive. All of the retention settings tell bacula when it MAY recycle volumes that have had all jobs purged from them, not when it MUST. By holding off on recycling volumes bacula keeps your data in the volumes as long as possible, providing more "fall-back positions" in case of "Oh $excrement" situations. So, with that in mind, when the volumes that you're trying to re-use are in "Append" status they're writeable by bacula and bacula sees no need to recycle them. So you need to make them not be writeable to bacula or it's not going to recycle them. To make your volumes NOT be appendable after a backup job set the pool they're in to "Maximum Volume Jobs = 1" and make sure you update the volumes to the pool resource or existing volumes won't change. That way at the end of your nightly backup job the volume it used will be set to "Used" instead of left at "Append." Oh, and if you run more than one backup job on each nightly tape, just set the "Maximum Volume Jobs" to reflect however many jobs it is that you run each night OR you could use the "Volume Use Duration = X Hours" directive in your pool definition to accomplish much the same thing without having to count how many jobs you run in a given night. X would have to be long enough for your backups to run, but not so long that the tape would be appendable next time it's loaded in the drive(s). I hope I got that right! -- -- Flak Magnet (Tim) www.flakmagnet.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------- SF.Net email is sponsored by: The Future of Linux Business White Paper from Novell. From the desktop to the data center, Linux is going mainstream. Let it simplify your IT future. http://altfarm.mediaplex.com/ad/ck/8857-50307-18918-4 _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users