On 03/09/2010 12:28 PM, John Drescher wrote: > On Tue, Mar 9, 2010 at 2:17 PM, C M Reinehr <c...@amsent.com> wrote: >> On Tue 09 March 2010 12:19:40 pm John Drescher wrote: >>> > I've always been a little unclear about the benefits of the .bsr >>> > files myself but mine is a small business so I can't speak for those with >>> > much larger, enterprise systems. They're small and are no trouble to back >>> > up, so I keep them against the possibility that I might really need them >>> > one day. >>> >>> They are most useful for restoring a corrupt catalog. >>> >>> John >> Thanks! I knew there had to be a good reason and that I just hadn't yet >> discovered it. :-) >> > > Also useful in disaster recovery when you do not have the database up > and running.
Maybe I should have explained more... Each of my backup jobs goes to a separate file named JobName-JobId-Level. These are copied to DVD. Only "user" files are backed up -- system files will be restored by re-installing the OS and apps. I do a full backup every two months with daily incrementals in between. My bare-metal recovery plan is: 1. Install a Linux machine from distribution media. 2. Install Bacula (a copy of the source and conf files is on the backup DVDs). 3. Configure Postgresql, create bacula db. 4. Identify the volume with the latest catalog backup (which is easy to do given my volume naming scheme), extract the catalog db backup (with bextract) and restore to the db. 5. I now should be able to do a full restore of the user files, yes? So why do I need the bsr files? The only thing I will be restoring without a catalog is the catalog itself and it is in a single volume file. This plan is admittedly time consuming but I can afford a couple days downtime (and I have found that I reinstall Linux (Fedora) pretty frequently anyway due to new versions, and same with Windows which suffers from bit- rot). The main problem I have with it is the requirement for a Linux machine in order to restore any of the Windows clients -- I would be much happier with Bacula if I could restore a Windows client with only a Windows machine available. Does this seem like a workable plan? (I have not tested it yet but will as soon as I can free up a spare disk and some time.) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
