On 11/5/2010 12:00 PM, Dermot Beirne wrote:
> Hello,
> I have been using bacula now for 1 year this month, and it's been a
> fairly smooth ride, but I have a number of questions that i'd be
> grateful for some direction on:
>
> Bacula version 3.0.2 on Ubuntu 9.04
>
> 1. I am concerned about my retention policy.  I have 4 disk pools and
> 4 corresponding tape pools.
>
> All the disk pools (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly) have a volume
> retention of 2 days and Volume Use Duration also 2 days
>
> The Tape Pools are as follows:
> Daily - 12 days
> Weekly - 32 days
> Monthly - 12 months
> Yearly - never recycle
>
> I am finding that when needing to restore from an old job, I have to
> run bscan on the tape as Bacula says it has no records for that job in
> it's catalog.
> This is even for monthly backups.  Why can this be?

Your Job Retention is too low.

> 2. Use of scratch pools.
> Every few weeks we have to print a list of the volumes (from the daily
> and sometimes weekly tape pools), and manually purge (purge jobs
> volume) anything older than the above retention times in order to
> force them back into the Scratch pool, as the Scratch pool runs out of
> volumes because Bacula is not automatically purging once the retention
> policy expires.
> Is there a fix for this?  Could this be causing/affecting point 1
> above (i.e. doing manual purges)?

Purging is the last resort. If the scratch pool contains Volumes, they 
will be used.

> 3. Disk pool structure.
> I have 4 directories on my backup server for the Disk pools, Daily,
> Weekly, Monthly and Yearly.  The Daily, Weekly and Monthly directories
> are all in the region of 1.4Tb in size.  The problem is that the
> server is near it's capacity of disk space, and I can't add any more
> clients until I address this.  I feel the current structure is not
> making the best use of the space.  The retention policy of 2 days on
> the disk volumes is to allow a tape copy job to run the morning after
> a nightly backup, and these tapes are then moved to a safe and
> replaced with Scratch tapes in the autoloader.  It also allows us to
> do a quick restore of a file that may have been deleted the previous
> day, which is the most common restore request.

It sound like you need to set a limit on the Pool so Bacula starts to 
recycle Volumes.  Bacula will not recycle Volumes if it is permitted to 
create new Volumes.

>
> The space taken up by the weekly and monthly volumes is wasted, as
> they have expired 2 days after use, but the space is still not
> available to the Daily volumes.  I suspect I'd get a lot more clients
> covered if I could change this.
>
> Is it possible to have a single directory shared by all pools, and all
> pools share and recycle the same volumes.  What are the pros and cons
> of doing this, or is there a better way.
>
> Is there any benefit in upgrading bacula to address any of these items.
>
> I'm sorry for the long mail, and appreciate anyone taking the time to read it.
> Advice welcome on how to proceed with Bacula from here.


-- 
Dan Langille - http://langille.org/

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