"Simon J Mudd" <sjmudd AT pobox DOT com> kirjoitti viestissä 
news:m3fx7mkdv3.fsf AT mad06.wl0 DOT org...
> timo-news AT tee-en DOT net ("Timo Neuvonen") writes:
>
>> "Simon J Mudd" <sjmudd AT pobox DOT com> kirjoitti viestissä
>
> ...
>
>> > Yes, but that's what I'm trying to avoid. I realise that I MUST have
>> > sufficient
>> > space really for at least 2 full backups plus some extra for 
>> > incrementals
>> > but I don't want to worry about the details. Therefore I want to 
>> > configure
>>
>> You said you don't want to worry about the details. However, one such 
>> very
>> strong detail is the schedule you already have specified, it says to run 
>> a
>> full backup once a month. Required retention time is closely related to
>> this, and needs to be specified too.
>
> Again, I think you're missing the point. You are right, in a business
> environment you do want to decide to do X full backups every certain
> period of time, X incrementals etc. and then you need to do some
> calculations to work out how much disk space you need for this. This
> value of course changes and you may later need to add more storage or
> tapes or whatever to accommodate these changes.
>
> Think of the normal HOME user who may have an interest in Bacula to
> backup data. He has a "unix" PC with disks occupying say 100GB of
> space. So he buys himself a 1TB external USB disk and wants to use
> that for backups. If it's dedicated he'll want to use ALL the space
> for backups and keep as much as he can. So he's likely to want to do
> perhaps a single weekly or monthly backup followed by incrementals in
> between. Exactly how many backups he keeps is relatively unimportant.
>
> And for this type of scenario bacula is tricky (from what I can see)
> to setup. I've had multiple problems (due to misconfiguration) of bacula
> not labelling new disk devices in the pool and also when the disk starts
> to fill up of not removing the oldest backups.
>
> I'm not a backup "administrator" and have plenty of other distractions
> which prevent me properly working out how to get bacula running properly.
> That's why I suggested a recipe for the type of configuration I suggest
> might be extremely useful.
>
>> Since now you haven't specified the volume retention, Bacula uses its
>> internal default which is one year, 365 days. You have to specify a 
>> shorter
>> volume retention time if you want to be able to recycle the volumes 
>> sooner.
>
> But I dont' want retention to depend on time, but disk usage.
>



Bacula can use all disk space you allow it to use, that is controlled with 
volume size and maximum number of volumes, that you had set to reasonable 
values in the configuration. The volume retention time is just a minimum 
time limit; if your disk space will allow it, the old data in un-recycled 
volumes will still be available there after much longer time (in theory, 
forever). I think this is what you wanted, so I can't see any actual problem 
there. But if you absolutely don't want to change the default volume 
retention time to something that would fit to your application, there isn't 
much else to do, I think. Explicitly specifying the volume retention time is 
the only way to make Bacula recycle the volumes in less than a year, since 
365 days is Bacula's internal default.



> ...
>
>> Btw, you can use "list media" command to see the status of the existing
>> volumes.
>
> so while you can define how many volumes to have and their sizes you can't
> get bacula to purge based on these values?
>
> ...
>
>> > the "pool" to auto purge if it fills up. New full or incremental 
>> > backups
>> > will create new volumes as needed, and the older ones will get purged.
>>
>> Actually, Bacula will recycle the existing volumes, that is, discard the 
>> old
>> data in the volume, and use the same "recycled" volume again. So the 
>> volume
>> name won't change (unless this is possible due to some very new Bacula
>> feature).
>
> That's fine. In the end I don't care howe the volumes are labelled, or if
> new ones are created or existing ones are reused.
>
>> Within reasonable limits (reasonable amount of disk space available), 
>> this
>> should be possible with Bacula.
>
> So it sounds part of my problem has been to misunderstand the precise 
> terms
> used in Bacula. It sounds like I don't want to purge the disk volumes, but
> to recycle them. So how do I configure this:
>
> - A fixed number of disk volumes of a predetermined size which will
> be "recycled" when no more space is left? Ideally the recycling in this 
> simple
> case would be based on a FIFO type principal.
>


If you don't want to have _any_ minimum time limit for volume retention, 
just set it to one second, which propably is the shortest value you can 
specify.

In theory, this can result in a situation that if your one full backup would 
consume more space than is designated for backup use, and recycling of the 
first volume used for that backup would then happen before that backup is 
finished. But if you prefer this, instead of seeing an error message in this 
obvious case of malfunctioning, go for it.

Seriously, a more reasonable value might be one hour, or one day. But if you 
want, you can (at least you should, I guess no one has ever tried it) use 
value of as short as one second.



> Simon
>
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