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

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