We have been using Bacula for a few years now and have enjoyed its
features. But I need some help to understand one key retention period
concept. Our fundamental issue is attempting to make sure we have good
backups for a minimum amount of retention period. Our issue is being
able to set a File Retention, Job Retention, and/or Volume Retention for
a period of time with using the least amount of space but ensuring that
we have a solid 30 days of total backups. If I had to label the
properties I would think this would be called:
MinBackupRetentionPeriod. Which sounds easy, but let me describe an
example:
Assume we have the following:
> 400 servers being backed up
> We want a minimum of 30 day of solid backups for retention.
> We use File type storage for all of our backups
> Since we use File storage we want to use the space the smartest way
> Assume that if a Full fails to run that it is considered lost and we
need to wait until the following scheduled Full backup (next weekend)
Business Requirement:
- We need to be able to pull a backup of any file for any day within the
past 30 day period of time.
Not so perfect world:
- So in a perfect world this is very easy to accomplish. But lets just
say for purposes of discussion that we have the following backup schedule:
Full Backups - Every Weekend
Incremental Backups - Every Weekday
Lets assume that we have a File Retention and Job retention set to 30
days each. Now lets also assume that we have two Weekends where the
Full backups fail for one of the servers. No big deal since the next
weekend we can get a new Full. So to put dates on this:
Full Backup: 01/01/11 - Successful
Full Backup: 01/08/11 - Failed
Full Backup: 01/15/11 - Failed
Full Backup: 01/22/11 - Successful
Lets assume all of the Incremental backups were also Successful in
between the fulls. So now its 02/13/11. The business user asks for a
file that was on the server on 01/16/11. Noticed that since our Job and
File retention is set to 30 days and the 01/01/11 Full Backup has been
purged, that we now can not recover that file since we are missing the
Full Failed Backup from the 01/15/11 date. We have the Incrementals but
without the Full we can not have a consistent recovery.
So the Question is: Does Bacula have a way to make sure that it holds
onto the last successful Backup in order to maintain integrity
regardless of the Retention period. So the ideal concept would be that
Bacula would hold onto a Volume/Job/File based on its Retention period
AND the retention date of its Dependent Backups. So in this picture, it
would be great if Bacula would hold onto the 01/01/11 Full Backup for
the 30 retention period assigned to the 01/21/11 last dependent
Incremental Backup.
This may be possible already within Bacula, or maybe some other
combination of flags would make it easier to implement that I have not
seen yet. The documentation seems to say that the Retention periods are
based on a hard time frame and once that time frame has passed, then the
files are free to be purged. Any thoughts or advise...? Thanks...
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