Erich> I'm looking for a little advice on a setup I have here.  I have
Erich> 300TB of non-changing data that I need to archive.  I have a
Erich> Dell ML6000 tape library that holds like 41 LTO-5 tapes
Erich> (connected to a CentOS 6 Server), and I have a pile of hundreds
Erich> of tapes to do this job with.

Quick question, how long do you plan on keeping this data?  And how
often do you plan on restoring it?  If this is for an archive, which
you expect to be usable for years and years, then I'd suggest that you

a) make two copies of each set of data, bacula can do this.

b) make sure you verify each tape that's written by reading it back,
   bacual can do this too

Erich> So, I was basically planning on doing a whole bunch of separate
Erich> "full" backups with no incrementals or differentials, and then
Erich> ship the tapes off-site.  Each backup job would be 10TB in
Erich> size, so I would have like 30 10TB chunks to back up.  This is
Erich> so if any failed, it wouldn't be a big deal to just fix the
Erich> problem and re-run that 10TB chunk again.

Sounds like a decent plan.  As long as people don't add stuff into the
archive behind your back.  *grin*  But in that case, you can just run
an incremental and do steps a) and b) above. 

Erich> But, I'm wondering what happens when the whole tape library is
Erich> full?  Is there a way I can tell it to wait while I load and
Erich> label 41 more tapes into the same pool, then issue a "resume"
Erich> command of some sort?

Bacula will just wait for new tapes to be loaded, so it's easy enough
to empty the library, put in more tapes and keep going.  If you have
multiple drives, then leave one drive for the labeling of new tapes
and cloning of tapes. 

Erich> Or, do I have to pre-label all 300 tapes from the start (in
Erich> batches), have them in the same pool, so bacula knows I have
Erich> more tapes on the shelf waiting to go when the 41 tapes in the
Erich> library?

Nope, you shouldn't have to do that.  Just make sure that once you've
written half the tapes in the library, that you start to pull them out
and put in new ones and get them labeled ahead of time, just so that
you keep up the throughput.  300Tb is going to take a long time to
write...

John

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