On 15/04/2010 7:33 AM, ikkysleepy wrote:
>
>
>>
>>
>>> 1) When making a Full backup, does this replace the expired backup or will
>>> this create a new Volume on the drive?
>>
>>
>> Depends on your pool configuration. In most setups it'll recycle an
>> older volume that's outside its retention period. See the bacula
>> documentation.
>>
>
>
> I guess I am not sure if a Full backup will override the existing backup.
> Does a full backup override only retired backups? So does this mean I have to
> set the volume to expire in 3 months and schedule a full job in 3 months + 1
> day?
>
> What I don't want is to have a second volume created because the drive is
> only 1TB and another full backup + existing incrementals will exceed the
> capacity.
Then you'll need a bigger disk.
If you try to keep only one backup at a time, so that you have to delete
it to update it, you cannot trust that backup. I promise you that if you
ever do need the backup, you'll need it on Sunday morning just after
Bacula has truncated it and started to overwrite it with next week's.
That's why Bacula makes doing this rather difficult. It's a really,
REALLY bad idea. At the very minimum you need *two* full backup volumes,
so that one can be being written to while the other is safely stored. If
you do not have enough space for that, you need to get more space.
To give you some idea, my backup server has 6TB of usable storage - 8
1TB HDDs in RAID 6, plus two hot spares. So it has 6 / 10 TB usable. I
have two servers which have a >1TB full backup file set, so I need more
than least 4TB of space (2 backups each for 2 servers) for those two alone.
If you really, really, really want to keep only one volume, you can find
out how in the manual. But honestly, you're better off with even a RAID0
array (!!) on your backup server if that gives you room for two backup
sets, rather than just trying to have one. Better again, buy two more
disks and use RAID 5.
If your file set is fairly static in nature - it's only added to, so
there's not much "churn" in old files - you can instead take a single
full backup manually, and then do daily incrementals thereafter,
consolidating them into differentials say weekly. You never need to
replace the full backup. However, this only works IF:
- You don't generally delete files; and
- *YOU TEST YOUR BACKUPS REGULARLY TO MAKE SURE THE FULL BACKUP
VOLUME IS UNDAMAGED AND READABLE*.
>>> 2) Can you force the Full backup to expire on a weekend?
>>
>> Why would you want to?
>
> I want to force the job to run on weekends because I don't know if 6 hours
> will be enough to backup 400 GB, M-F.
So you don't actually care exactly when the old backup(s) expire and
certainly don't need them to do so on a weekend. You only need to
schedule the backup so that it'll run on a weekend, and make sure the
retention periods are set so that an old backup will expire on *or*
*before* the weekend so it can be recycled when Bacula needs it.
--
Craig Ringer
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