Hi - I've spent the better part of a week here going through Bacula documentation, going through the quick start, and acquainting myself more with Bacula. I've known of Bacula for years now. I've tinkered with it in the past, so for this latest project I had a considerable head start than what I've had in attempts prior.
Now, I need to implement Bacula. Sheepishly, I'll admit, that throughout my professional career I've never taken on backups because it was largely "somebody else's job". Unfortunately, now, that seems to be biting me in the ass. I'm familiar with technical concepts of backups, why they're needed, what they do, how long they live - heck, I even make my own backups, but in a much simpler process than Bacula provides. Simple tarballs on crons obviously isn't good enough for me because I know at this point in time I know I need to consider something more robust, flexible and long-term such as Bacula. I've familiarized myself to the point where I know what basic components are - director, storage daemon, file daemon, I know what a job is, I know what a schedule is, I know a job uses a pool and a pool is comprised of volumes. I'm familiar with *Bacula* enough to understand how it works, but not familiar enough with some more fundamental basics of "backups" as a whole and that's got me hanging. Why do we use volumes? It sounds like a silly question, but it's genuine. Is it so a backup can span several media types? Tape, file, disk, Pandora's box, what? Why do I care about volumes and how long they're retained, how often they're pruned, recycled, or what type they are? Why doesn't a Device (in my labs, I'm only using the File media type) have properties to define how large it is, rather, it's parent Volume specifies that? Why would I not want to back up to a Volume instead of a pool? How often can I expect to use the same Fileset or Schedule for similar machines? What kind of flexibility are people dealing with when specifying something one-off, concatenating Filesets, mixing Schedules, flipping between Pools. Is it more or less common for a Job - which would be specified one-per-backed-up-machine - to share Schedules and Filesets? I understand this is a loaded question, but I'm looking to figure out some of those "in practice" hypothetical questions that I've got in my mind. Granted, I can see how and understand why Bacula was designed with tapes in mind. Maybe a source of my confusion stems from the fact that maybe Bacula was almost designed specifically for tape backup, which I'm not using. I know these questions might seem kind of petty, in fact, maybe even inappropriate for this list. I know I'm going to get a lot of "read a book" responses, but I've specifically crafted these questions to answer some much more specific questions, and I think I'll have most of the pieces to the puzzle figured out. The Bacula manual provides an incredible wealth of information. I've not once ever seen a piece of software documented so well. It describes the details of each command and directive in much greater depth than anything I've ever seen. As far as I'm concerned, it's deserving of a Pulitzer. It does, however, assume a fair amount of knowledge on the reader's behalf with regards to how one should *properly* preform backups. I know there's no definitive answer; it's a loaded question. What I'm after is some feedback on how and why I should care about some of the minor (extrapolated as major, in due time?) details in my configuration. Thanks for taking the time to reading this message, and I look forward to getting some good feedback in the next few days. Thanks -dant ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ BlackBerry® DevCon Americas, Oct. 18-20, San Francisco, CA The must-attend event for mobile developers. Connect with experts. Get tools for creating Super Apps. See the latest technologies. Sessions, hands-on labs, demos & much more. Register early & save! http://p.sf.net/sfu/rim-blackberry-1 _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
