2009/5/4 Zhengquan Zhang
<zhang.zhengquan AT gmail DOT com>
Hello bacula community,
I am a newbie to bacula and backup but I have decided to use it for our
backup scheme:) we will backup two servers to a backup server.
I have got a few questions that I have not figured out the answer.
1.why does bacula use db as backend? why add additional this level of
complexity to the backup?
This is not something you have to know about to be able to use Bacula. The database is used to store all information about the backups which have been made including all files and their metadata. A database is the most efficient way to store that data.
For small installations a sqlite database is sufficient which hardly needs any setup. Read the documentation about it.
2. the folders I would like to backup are
monk
/home 79G
/etc
/srv/bitten 2G
/srv/www 23G
/srv/pub 32G
/srv/svnrepos 2G
/srv/trac 1.5G
/var 2G
total 160G
ccl
/home 19G // everyone's public_html and .maildir directory
/home/httpd 43G
/etc
/usr1 83G //including mailman and postgresql database
/var 8G
/Public 115G
/usr/local/cvsroot 3G
total 200G
I have got two 1T drive for raid1. so I have 1T space.
considering the size of my drive, what would be a reasonable back
scheme? How frequently should I do the full backup and how frequently
should I do the incremental backup?
The backup strategy depends on the importance of the data or certain parts of the data, the way the data is used (does it change a lot, how important are those changes, etc) and more things. Your collection of personal photo's need a different backup strategy than bank records or configuration settings etc.
What you can do is determine is what it would cost you if you lost x amount of hours or days of data and compare that to what it would cost to back that up every x amount of hours/days. Also, how long would you like to keep backups of the data. Every month for the last year? Every year for 5 years? I for example create a full backup every month and keep the last 6 months, and I create a incremental backup every day for which I keep the last 35 or so.
In short, there's no "best backup strategy" which works for everyone. You need to take a look at your specific situation and see what's best for you.
Concidering you have 360G of data, 1T of backup is not that much. It will just fit 2 full backups and some incrementals and/or differentials. I would certainly get some more space for the backup. With the current price of a 1Tb hardisk, avbailable space should not be a limitting factor in determining your backup strategy.
3. How large would the db grow if for example I do a full backup of the
above contents? Does bacula compress the contents?
Compared to the data being backed up, the size of the database isn't that large.
The data itsself can be compressed. How bacula stores the db contents depends on the database used (sqlite, mysql or postgres) and it isn't that important when initially setting up the backup because of the relatively small size.
Thanks for any suggestions and I am open to reading documents.
Reading is good :)
--
Zhengquan
I hope this helps a bit,
Cheers,
Maarten
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