In the message dated: Thu, 16 Oct 2008 10:08:07 +0200,
The pithy ruminations from Arno Lehmann on 
<Re: [Bacula-users] What causes orphaned Path/Files in database?> were:
=> Hi,
=> 
=> 16.10.2008 04:14, Hemant Shah wrote:
=> > 
=> 
=> > --- On Wed, 10/15/08, Arno Lehmann <al AT its-lehmann DOT de> wrote:
=> ...
=> > Thanks for the explanation, I will setup a cron job to run dbcheck.
=> 
=> I would be careful with a cron job... basically, as the dbcheck 
=> 
=> process can take a long time and locks the database, it can result in 
=> 
=> backups not running as scheduled.

A very good point.

In our environment, dbcheck takes about 3 days to run. The catalog is about 
21GB, and the server is a dual-proc 3.2GHz, 32-bit machine with 12GB of RAM, 
running bacula 1.38.11 and MySQL 5.?.

=> 
=> It's better, in my opinion, to just add the dbcheck to your list of 
=> 
=> things to do during maintenance periods. You usually don't need to run 
=> 
=> it more often than a few times a year, too, so if you choose to do 
=> 
=> that via cron, you should schedule it to a time where no backups run, 
=> 
=> and only run it monthly or even less often.

Hmmm... Do you know if the time to run dbcheck is proportional to the number of
catalog entries (the database size), or the number of orphaned entries? If it's
the former, than I'd agree that running dbcheck infrequently (during a
maintenance interval) is a good idea. However, if the time to run dbcheck is
proportional to the number of orphaned entries, then perhaps it should be run
much more often.

As far as running dbcheck when no backups are active, I'd suggest running it via
the "RunAfterJob" directive in the BackupCatalog job. You could write a wrapper
to dbcheck that looks for the presence of a file, such as:

        if [ -f /etc/run_dbcheck ] ; then
                dbcheck ..... && rm -f /etc/run_dbcheck
        fi

so that the RunAfterJob can execute after every backup, but the dbcheck is only 
executed if the "/etc/run_dbcheck" file was manually created in advance.


Mark

=> 
=> Arno
=> 
=> > Hemant Shah
=> > E-mail: hjrrs AT yahoo DOT com
=> > 
=> 
        [SNIP!]

=> 
=> Arno Lehmann
=> IT-Service Lehmann
=> Sandstr. 6, 49080 Osnabr=FCck
=> www.its-lehmann.de

[SNIP!]

----
Mark Bergman                              voice: 215-662-7310
mark.bergman AT uphs.upenn DOT edu                 fax: 215-614-0266
System Administrator     Section of Biomedical Image Analysis
Department of Radiology            University of Pennsylvania
      PGP Key: https://www.rad.upenn.edu/sbia/bergman 




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