I have this customer that wants to backup a filesystem that currently is a bit over 4TB used and grows up to 300GB per week. The growth is new files, existing files do not change. Each backup run, full/diff/inc are to go to 2 sets of tapes, one to keep in a vault onsite, one to go offsite. The expectation is for these tapes to never expire, and restores are to come from either side of what amounts to a tape mirror set, local set requested first. The data files will get pruned by age, so the disk requirement will not grow indefinitely just the tape requirement. The customer wants to ship the offsite tape only when it's full, I'd prefer to ship it as it is used, I want to have an implementation that supports either shipping time.
They currently have 1 (fairly idle) LTO-3 tape drive for this project, the current single tape backup of this filesystem has plenty of time to run. The existing backup of this filesystem was one full then incrementals. I read through the bacula archives and did not find anything that quite fit this request. I looked at copy jobs (easiest way to implement the request IMO), but the implication was that it required 2 drives. I had considered two implementation methods. 1. Backup to disk volumes then run one copy job to the onsite tape pool, and one migrate job to the other tape pool. My questions about this: A. What to do about the existing data in the filesystem? We have enough spool disk to put the weekly growth onto disk then do the copy and migrate, but not the existing data. B. How to ensure that any restore will first request the onsite tape? C. In the case of the onsite tape restore failing, how to specify the offsite tape, once it is delivered of course. 2. Modify the existing location that these files get copied into. Have a script pick up the files from the new directory, move them into "backup dir" hard link them to the space the users expect to find them, run two fulls on this new space. After two full jobs finish, remove the hard link in the "backup dir". Ship the offsite tape Issues here: A. How do I ensure that both full backups are successful before the link is removed. B. On restores how do ensure the local tape is requested, see item B and C from above. Am I setting up the catalog up for disaster with either method? Any thoughts on which is a better/cleaner implementation or suggestions for a better one? Thanks Ed M. !DSPAM:4bff3b3211881414713969! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users