On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 11:30 AM, John Drescher <drescherjm AT gmail DOT com> 
wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 2, 2011 at 11:09 AM, Joseph Spenner <joseph85750 AT yahoo DOT 
> com> wrote:
>> --- On Wed, 2/2/11, John Drescher <drescherjm AT gmail DOT com> wrote:
>>
>>> From: John Drescher <drescherjm AT gmail DOT com>
>>> Subject: Re: [Bacula-users] setting up a disk based backup system.
>>> To: "Kenneth Johansson" <kenneth AT southpole DOT se>
>>> Cc: bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
>>> Date: Wednesday, February 2, 2011, 8:34 AM
>>>
>>> You are using raid 0 and LVM for your bacula store? I would
>>> never ever
>>> do that. I even caution about using a single raid 5/6 for
>>> that. How
>>> about individual disks and the bacula virtual disk changer.
>>> Make each
>>> physical disk a virtual magazine.
>>>
>>> http://sourceforge.net/projects/vchanger/
>>>
>>> John
>>>
>>
>> John:
>>  I didn't know there was a special project dedicated to this.  I've been 
>> using a 7xSATA removable disk setup, with 3 sets of 7 disks (yes, for a 
>> total of 21 SATA disks :)  for a while now and it's been great.  What does 
>> this vchanger provide that I'm not getting?
>>
>
> I believe it simplifies the setup. Each drive can be mounted
> automatically using autofs. vchanger has autofs support so you can put
> any number of your disks in and issue update slots and it will find
> the disks mount them and inform bacula which volumes are available.
> Remember that each physical disk is a virtual autochanger magazine
> containing a user specified # of bacula volumes. I use fixed sized
> volumes in this case. I do not believe this works well with people
> that have max jobs or use volume once settings in their pool since
> there is a fixed number of volumes in each magazine. Like a tape
> autochanger it will not get around bacula wanting a volume that is not
> loaded in the virtual changer so you must handle that.
>
> Also for your case there is not a clean way to convert from existing
> volumes to virtual magizine volumes. I guess you can use copy jobs or
> something like that but if you have a working setup I would just go
> with that.
>
> BTW, I am using this at home where I only backup a few 100 GB. At work
> I am using primarily LTO2 tapes (105 of them now) and a 2 drive tape
> autochanger.
> John
>

I missed one very important thing. Being that it is a virtual
autochanger and has the concept of multiple virtual devices you can
add multiple virtual devices to allow for better concurrency. This
allows you to get around the problem of not being able to load more
than 1 pool at a time since its easy to add 5 drives to the virtual
autochanger and each of these drives could be working on a volume from
a different pool from any one of your loaded magazines.

-- 
John M. Drescher

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