Re: [Bacula-users] Spooling and backup concept

2010/8/26 <me AT free-minds DOT net>

Hello,

Hello,

I think this is a common question but i didnt found a proper answear in
the documentenation, if there is already one please let me know :)

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).

If you write volumes on filesystem, then you don't need a spool. Spool is needed only when source client is slower then destination tape drive.
Without spool tape drive is forced to start writing on tape when some data arrive, stop writing on tape when data buffer is empty (due slow client), and again start, stop...
This is very non optimal solution. When you have a spool, your data buffer could be very large (ex. a few GB, TB) which means it can provide enough data stream for tape drive for optimal performance.

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...

It depends on your recovery procedures. One of possible solution is to reinstall operating system from installation media, reinstall required application binaries and finally recover data from backup system. Another possible solution is recover everything from backup system using bare metal recovery procedures, which is available for Bacula too. You can check: http://www.bacula.org/fr/dev-manual/Disast_Recove_Using_Bacula.html or similar pages.

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.

It depends if you recover whole system by hand or using scripting for automating this process. Fresh installation of operating system could be very slow too, depends on installation media, number of updates, available resources to configure, etc.
You have to keep in mind, that backup performed by Bacula take care of contents of files, not hardware and logical configuration (disk partitions, bootloaders, raid configs, etc.)

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...

80GB/17H ~= 1.3MB/s which is very slow. You have to check bottlenecks in your configuration (network, cpu, io, etc).

General rule is to backup no less and no more data then is required for full recover.

thanks in advance!

You welcome.

Regards

--
Radosław Korzeniewski
radoslaw AT korzeniewski DOT net

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