Hello, I have been using bacula now for 1 year this month, and it's been a fairly smooth ride, but I have a number of questions that i'd be grateful for some direction on:
Bacula version 3.0.2 on Ubuntu 9.04 1. I am concerned about my retention policy. I have 4 disk pools and 4 corresponding tape pools. All the disk pools (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly) have a volume retention of 2 days and Volume Use Duration also 2 days The Tape Pools are as follows: Daily - 12 days Weekly - 32 days Monthly - 12 months Yearly - never recycle I am finding that when needing to restore from an old job, I have to run bscan on the tape as Bacula says it has no records for that job in it's catalog. This is even for monthly backups. Why can this be? 2. Use of scratch pools. Every few weeks we have to print a list of the volumes (from the daily and sometimes weekly tape pools), and manually purge (purge jobs volume) anything older than the above retention times in order to force them back into the Scratch pool, as the Scratch pool runs out of volumes because Bacula is not automatically purging once the retention policy expires. Is there a fix for this? Could this be causing/affecting point 1 above (i.e. doing manual purges)? 3. Disk pool structure. I have 4 directories on my backup server for the Disk pools, Daily, Weekly, Monthly and Yearly. The Daily, Weekly and Monthly directories are all in the region of 1.4Tb in size. The problem is that the server is near it's capacity of disk space, and I can't add any more clients until I address this. I feel the current structure is not making the best use of the space. The retention policy of 2 days on the disk volumes is to allow a tape copy job to run the morning after a nightly backup, and these tapes are then moved to a safe and replaced with Scratch tapes in the autoloader. It also allows us to do a quick restore of a file that may have been deleted the previous day, which is the most common restore request. The space taken up by the weekly and monthly volumes is wasted, as they have expired 2 days after use, but the space is still not available to the Daily volumes. I suspect I'd get a lot more clients covered if I could change this. Is it possible to have a single directory shared by all pools, and all pools share and recycle the same volumes. What are the pros and cons of doing this, or is there a better way. Is there any benefit in upgrading bacula to address any of these items. I'm sorry for the long mail, and appreciate anyone taking the time to read it. Advice welcome on how to proceed with Bacula from here. Regards, Dermot. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Next 800 Companies to Lead America's Growth: New Video Whitepaper David G. Thomson, author of the best-selling book "Blueprint to a Billion" shares his insights and actions to help propel your business during the next growth cycle. Listen Now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/SAP-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
