On 26/08/10, me AT free-minds DOT net (me AT free-minds DOT net) wrote:
> So we have now successfully set up our Bacula Servers and everything is
> now running more or less...
> But we have some questions:
> 1) do we really need to spool? We are not writing to real tapes, we have a
> filesystem as backend (ext3 over glusterfs). 

Spooling is optional.

http://www.bacula.org/en/dev-manual/main/main/Data_Spooling.html 

> 2) should we backup our whole system or just our data? I heard several
> concepts what we really should backup... Because if we have lost our server
> and the database isnt restorable, we cant restore the whole system, because
> file attrs are lost and every file will get 664 or something like that...
> Also I heard that a restore of the whole system is very slow, we should
> install a fresh debian, install our packages and restore our data. 
> actually we have arround 80GB of Full backup (takes arround 17h) and 10GB
> incremental (takes arround 2-3h). If we only backup the real data it would
> be much lesser...

Its obviously completely up to you.

You may want to do monthly or weekly backups of everything, and daily
backups of everything that changes. Most backup regimes mix periodic
"snapshots" with regular "incremental" backups. Bacula has three
main types of backup: full (complete dumps), differential (files changed
since last full backup), and incremental (changed files since the last
backup of any sort) backups.
(See Backup Levels: http://www.backupcentral.com/wiki/index.php/Bacula).

You may find this helpful:
http://www.bacula.org/fr/dev-manual/Backup_Strategies.html

-- 
Rory Campbell-Lange
rory AT campbell-lange DOT net

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sell apps to millions through the Intel(R) Atom(Tm) Developer Program
Be part of this innovative community and reach millions of netbook users 
worldwide. Take advantage of special opportunities to increase revenue and 
speed time-to-market. Join now, and jumpstart your future.
http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-atom-d2d
_______________________________________________
Bacula-users mailing list
Bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users