On Apr 27, 2009, at 2:00 PM, Arno Lehmann wrote:
> I'd suggest to just back up that pool with a very plain setup.
> Accurate backups will be good, probably.
My only questions is, given it's extensive use of hardlinks to
minimize the pool size, if there anything special needed when backing
it up to tape to minimize storage space on tape much like is done on
disk. I guess I need to investigate this a bit more... I guess I was
thinking that surely someone had actually done it before and was
hoping for a "tested" answer. But maybe not, because if someone has
gone through the process to understand Bacula enough to use it, they
probably don't use BackupPC any longer... :)
> Should work, though I haven't used virtual fulls yet. Especially
> regarding pool and volume management, virtual fulls can be a bit of a
> challenge - for simplicity, I'd suggest to use a more straightforward
> setup at least to get started with Bacula. You can refine your
> procedures later on anyway.
I think it is going to be complex on the setup, but hopefully simple
for the usage... If it works properly, then you'd pretty much have
just one "full" backup for each system, because after a successful
incremental or differential to update things, it would roll back into
a current "full". I just think it would probably require some
scripted stuff after every backup to handle this (or nightly), and
probably shuffling things from pool to pool or volume to volume to
keep it straight. That's why it's puzzling to think about as I am just
trying to learn the basics. You are quite right, I need to get a
simple system in place first. :)
>> The notes on page 10 of the Concepts document talk about the Copy
>> job, and give a sample config, but I think part of it is missing...
>> It mentions a "Storage = vtl" without any storage definition. I
>> suppose if I were familiar with bacula, I'd know what to put here,
>> but
>> I do not.
>
> Ignore it for now, it will become clear once you've got a real Bacula
> setup.
I asked because I thought that would be required to eventually get
where I want to go.
The real problem here is the fact that until I get this working, we
will have no backup mechanism in place, so I'm not really keen on the
idea of fiddling around for a long time to learn. I wish I had the
luxury of setting up a test environment for a few weeks or months, but
I can't afford that. However, I think the things I am trying to use
are fairly new additions to Bacula, so maybe it's not likely anyone
has a tested implementation to share configs from.
It makes me nervous to trust only a disk backup here without being
able to dump to tape, especially since I can't take the disk-based
server offsite. :) Also, I am accustomed to having a set of tapes
daily, or weekly at the worst case, to take offsite that contain full
backups. I'm having a hard time picturing how differentials and
incrementals all fit together into the picture of how we've done
things and cover us with offsite daily/weekly dumps.
> With a pool per backup level, that's quite simple - you just set the
> volume retention time for the pools accordingly. Keep full backups for
> three months, differentials for six weeks, and incrementals for 16
> days, for example.
>
> Then, the target pool for the copied full backups could have a longer
> retention time - you could even use different pools, and move selected
> jobs to a pool with a longer retention time.
>
> The key thing to remember is, in my opinion, that the time you keep
> your data can be controlled most easily by setting the pools retention
> time accordingly. The client and job based retention times can be
> longer - once a volume is pruned, the related jobs are also pruned.
It may take months before I understand that. :) I'm sure it's
elegant, but again, I've always only rotated the backups so that daily
(M-Th), Weekly (F, unique for each week) and monthly tapes were all
full dumps so that any one could be taken offsite and have a full set
of data. That is probably why I am fighting all the stuff documented,
because I don't want to deal with all the incrementals/differentials
when it comes to the daily tape storage... For disk storage, that
would be great, but when I take a tape set out of the drive I want it
to be complete.
Thanks, really, I appreciate it!
Steve
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