Hi there!
We are currently using bacula for a while (3/4 years maybe) to backup many
servers (VMs as weel as physical machines) on a storage server (volumes are
not tapes, but basically only labelled files of 1GB size).
We don't have a complicated architecture, even if we backup every night
around 50 servers. The only thing we need is to be able to restore one or
more files, but having different version of the same file is not important
to us.
So here is what we used to have (until we realized we were wrong):
- 2 full backups a month (1st and 3rd weeks of the month, on Saturday night)
- incremental backups otherwise
This means for a month, for instance:
FIIIIII-IIIIIII-FIIIIII-IIIIII
Everything seemed to be OK until I tried to restore something yesterday.
The problem I found is that when we initially setuped bacula, storage was a
huge constraint (we hadn't any storage server actually) and every retention
parameters were set to 7 days:
- Client: file/job/volume retention = 7 days
- Pool (the same pool is used for full and incr backups, which is ok in our
case, am I right?): volume retention = 7 days
Ok so it's quite obvious we had a huge problem there. To my mind, we should
have no problem to restore anything the week following the full backup but
there were still two blacks weeks in the month where we couldn't restore in
a proper way (we could restore as best effort though... What I actually
did).
Thus to rethink our bacula configuration I've tried since to read bacula
(5.0.0) manual and forums on the Internet, without being able to clearly
understand what is the purpose of each retention time. Logically I would set
the retentions to 14 days everywhere, and this should solves the problem,
but I am not sure of that and as I could experiment, I'd prefer understand
what I'm doing.
Could somebody point me to a manual section that would explain me (without
going into the deep details of Bacula) how to set either:
- client: file/job/volume retention parameters?
- pool: which retention parameters are available and if they are redundant
or not with the others above?
Also, I know the scenario is really simple compared to most of yours, but if
somebody already achieved something similar (2 or 1 full a month and then
incrementals), I'd be very greatful if he'd explain to me how to do it.
Thanks in advance everybody and sorry if I feel like I am searching
information at the wrong place.
Florent Krieg
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