Heitor Faria <heitor AT bacula.com DOT br> wrote:
>
> I have a 12 tb disk array and I use the disks individually
> (since my boss dont want to use RAID). Each disk is a single
> storage for Bacula (but it makes addministration a little bit
> complex). Is there a way of using all disks volumes as a single
> Bacula storage? I think it would be a nice feature.
I built a dedicated Bacula SD box from a 2U Intel-branded
server. It has 12 x 1TB SATA drives, and boots off of an
IDE solid state disk. After fighting with all kinds of
issues trying to push those RAID controllers past 2TB LUNs,
I gave up and formatted each of the 12 drives as a standalone
file system.
Since I'm using this SD as a ring buffer and expiring the
oldest virtual tape (vtape), what I did was to tell Bacula
to create/label 96 new vtapes in a /vtape folder on the solid
state boot drive. Each one is set for a maximum size of
115 GB, and the size was chosen because it could fit onto
an LTO tape in an emergency if we needed to vacate the backup
disks for some reason. Each of the 12 1TB disks is mounted
on the root of the SSD drive as well, as /disk1 - /disk12 .
Having the [blank] virtual tapes created, I then moved the
file for vtape1 to /disk1, vtape2 to /disk2, all the way up
to vtape12 onto /disk12. From there, I started over again,
moving vtape13 to /disk1, all the way up to vtape96 onto
/disk12. (I was thinking that I'd like to spread the tape
dates out, so that a single drive failure wouldn't wipe out
a week's worth of backups if the vtape files were copied
sequentially to the drives. I'm not advocating one way or
the other, but this is how I did it. It may make more sense
in your local environment to use larger vtape files, copy
vtape1-vtape8 to /drive1, vtape9-vtape16 to /drive2, or maybe
even use another scheme, but considering how you will handle
a drive failure is something to consider since there's no
RAID in place.)
When I was done, there were 8 vtapes on each physical drive,
and Bacula didn't know how to access them any more. The fix
was quite simple...symlink from each vtape's original location
to it's new one!!! As long as Bacula does not need to create
a new vtape volume, the SD seems to happily follow the
symlinks to the relocated virtual tape files in both Bacula 2.x
and Bacula 3.x. I actually have two of these SD boxes now,
operating as headless appliances stashed in network edge
wiring closets 1km and 3km away from our main server room.
Although I haven't tried it, I imagine that symlinks could
be used in a similar way with removable/USB hard drives, as
long as the symlink pointed to the proper vtape files when
the drive was mounted. Of course, you might be better off
using LVM or a vchanger, but symlinks have been working fine
for me in what sounds like the same environment you're trying
to build.....
-Arthur
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
Arthur Emerson III Email: emerson AT msmc DOT edu
Network Administrator InterNIC: AE81
Mount Saint Mary College MaBell: (845) 561-0800 Ext. 3109
330 Powell Ave. Fax: (845) 562-6762
Newburgh, NY 12550 SneakerNet: Aquinas Hall Room 60
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