Hi everybody, I've tried to wrap my head around automatic volume recycling, but it seems that my backup strategy isn't quite compatible with Bacula's volume recycling policy, and maybe there's someone out here who knows a solution :)
I'm backing up multiple systems with multiple tape drives. For each storage, I have a series of tape pools in a classic daily/weekly/monthly backup schedule. Tapes are physically being swapped out every day and stored off-site, which is a requirement. Now, daily tapes are supposed to get overwritten every week, weekly tapes every month, monthly tapes ever year. So far so good, I've got all pools set up with appropriate retention periods so tapes get marked as recycleable in time. Now my problem is that bacula always leaves the last tape in "appendable" state, and when the tape gets inserted for its next write cycle, it will not overwrite this tape, but only append to it - even though the retention period of the tape has expired. The manual makes very clear that this is intentional, but it's not what I need, and not what I want, especially if the backups going to one particular pool consist only of one single tape. I really don't want to double the number of tapes, and on the other hand, I also don't want to manually have to update all obsolete, but still appendable volumes. The whole process should be as automated as possible, so the operator only has to swap out the tapes in time, with no further manual intervention. I thought I could solve the problem by setting the maximum volume use time to a value that is equal to its retention time - but the volume use time will only be updated AFTER a job has finished, and never BEFORE a job gets started. So the first job in the new cycle will always be appended to last week's backup, no matter what I do. And ideas how to solve this problem in an elegant way? Or am I just too stupid to read the manual? :) Best Regards, Sven ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Live Security Virtual Conference Exclusive live event will cover all the ways today's security and threat landscape has changed and how IT managers can respond. Discussions will include endpoint security, mobile security and the latest in malware threats. http://www.accelacomm.com/jaw/sfrnl04242012/114/50122263/ _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
