This discussion comes up every few weeks so I would search the
archives. Also look into the disk-changer script as it may help a lot.

On Mon, Jan 12, 2009 at 10:03 AM, Martin Schmid <scm AT apsag DOT com> wrote:
> Kevin is right stating that there's some room for improvments. I'm using
> bacula for both tape and disk backups and I'm still searching for 'the
> best' solution to implement swapable drives.
>
> Bacula needs to know the devices and this is difficult for drives that
> are hot-swapped.
>
> I'm using a workaround by udev. Udev can be taught to always create my
> Maxtor USB-Drive as /dev/icybox1 while any disk found on my
> SATA-Controller shows up as /dev/icybox5. For bacula this is a situation
> it can handle. It's not natively bacula, though.
>

udev rules are the standard way to prevent the operating system from
changing device nodes for devices bacula sees. I use this even for
tape devices.

>
> The other problem with disks is that there's no clear instruction to the
> operator. How should an operator know that the volume BOX_1723 is
> located on the physical disk #3? So what to do when bacula asks for it?
>
> The only way is to disable autolabelling. The admin needs to set up a
> known range of volumes and write a sticker to mark the drives with the
> volumes on it.
>
I would prelabel 10 to 20 volumes on each disk. You can easily script
this from the shell injecting commands into bconsole.

Something like:
echo "label ..." | bconsole

in a bash for loop.

>
> It would be great if bacula could use a device just like it uses a
> single tape drive: without file system on it, up to its capacity, and
> being the volume itself.
>

You could create just one volume on the drive and that would do this.
However this is not good for recycling.


John

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This SF.net email is sponsored by:
SourcForge Community
SourceForge wants to tell your story.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/sf-spreadtheword
_______________________________________________
Bacula-users mailing list
Bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users