I am running 2.0.3 on Fedora 8 for my director, which also provides SD 
for my tape drive. I am having troubles understanding tape 
rotation/recycling, I guess, even though I have read the section 
"Automatic Volume Recycling" in the manual a dozen times or more.

My goal is to use two tapes, swapping them every two weeks and 
overwriting them when I do. I have 10GB tapes (w/o hardware compression) 
  and backup about 4GB per week. So far so good. The trouble comes when 
I need to exchange the tape. It's difficult to describe the exact 
scenarios when it will not work; there is so much time between each 
session when I try to understand it that I forget things and end up 
nearly starting over each time. I have been through a number of 
iterations, but my current configuration is below. Often it will just 
wait for days with the correct (by my expectations) tape mounted, but 
jobs will not run. "status storage=mytape" shows that it seems to be 
unhappy with the current tape for whatever reason.

I have found previously that once I got the tape to "Recycled" or 
"Purged" state (sometimes by manually pruning/purging), Bacula would use 
the tape if I restarted the director (or maybe restarted the storage?). 
Damn, I just restarted them both to check and now there are no jobs 
waiting on the tape and the tape is no longer in state "BLOCKED waiting 
for mumblemumble". I guess I'll so if they run tonight.

At any rate, here are the important bits of my configuration; perhaps 
someone can tell me if I am doing something boneheaded.

My clients are all basically the same as this, with the exception of 
name, address and password:

Client {
   Name      = myhost
   Address   =  myhost
   FDPort    = 9102
   Catalog   = MyCatalog
   Password  = "xxx"
   File Retention = 14 days
   Job Retention = 14 days
   AutoPrune = yes
}

Pool sets my volume size, count, retention period and use duration. Hm, 
is "Recycle Current Volume = yes" what I am missing? Or would "Recycle 
Oldest Volume" be better, so pruning doesn't happen on the tape that 
needs to be swapped out if it takes me a few days to do it (which it 
does sometimes)?

Pool {
   Name          = Default
   Pool Type     = Backup
   Recycle       = yes
   AutoPrune     = yes
   Maximum Volume Bytes = 10 gb
   Maximum Volumes = 2
   Volume Retention = 14 days
   Volume Use Duration =  14 days
   LabelFormat   = "TR5-${Year}-${Month:p/2/0/r}-${Day:p/2/0/r}"
}

Jobs and JobDefs; nothing too special here:

JobDefs {
   Name              = "DefaultJob"
   Type              = Backup
   Level             = Incremental
   Schedule          = "WeeklyCycle"
   Storage           = mytape
   Messages          = Standard
   Pool              = Default
   Priority          = 10
   SpoolData         = yes
}

Job {
   Name              = "myhost-selective"
   JobDefs           = "DefaultJob"
   FileSet           = "myhost Selective Set"
   Client            = myhost-fd
   Write Bootstrap   = "/var/spool/bacula/myhost.bsr"
   RunBeforeJob      = "/etc/backup.d/backup"
}


Thanks for taking the time to read through this!

Wil

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