> I am interested in using bacula to backup several desktop systems
> (Windows XP and Snow Leopard). We have stopped using Retrospect because
> of its general unreliability and slow speed, and I am trying to
> determine if bacula will meet our needs.
>
> With Retrospect, we backed up to hard drives and when a drive filled up,
> Retrospect would ask us to add a new drive to its "media set". We were
> then able to unmount and eject the old drive, then place it on a shelf
> in an anti-static bag.
>
> I have set up a system running Ubuntu, and it has four eSATA plugs. From
> what I have read so far, I believe that bacula is able to write the
> backups into files on a single hard drive, but I'm confused about what
> happens when the drive fills up.

Bad things. You want to avoid that situation.. First of all you want
to make volumes such that a single hard drive contains many 10 to 100
volumes. This will aide in recycling since bacula recycles all or
none.

> I do not want to use RAID or anything
> LVM-related, since that would prevent us from being able to take old
> volumes offline. Is there a way to make bacula work in a similar way to
> how Retrospect did (minus the unreliability and slowness:)?
>

Not out of the box. But it can be done. I suggest you take a look at
the bacula-vchanger

http://sourceforge.net/projects/vchanger/

and make each removable disk a virtual autochanger magazine with a
fixed amount of fixed sized volumes.

Either way to get this to work you will have to learn bacula and
customize it to what you want to do.

John

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