On Oct 17, 2012, at 11:30 AM, Florent Krieg wrote:

> 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

Well, it's OK, but the problem is, any backup more that 7 days will not be 
listed
in the Catalog.  It may well exist on disk, but without the Catalog entries, 
there
is no *EASY* way to restore that backup.  And ease-of-restore is exactly what
the Catalog is there for.

> 
> 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.

Retention is all about the Catalog, not necessarily the backup.

Retention is: how long do you want to record this backup in the Catalog.

I recommend keeping all retentions the same: Volume, Job, File.

> 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?

Volume retention is not a Client attribute.  Job and File are.

I would search for all mentions of retention here
http://www.bacula.org/5.2.x-manuals/en/main/main/Configuring_Director.html#SECTION0022130000000000000000

NOTE this is the same file as the next URL, just a different section

> - pool: which retention parameters are available and if they are redundant 
> or not with the others above?

Volume retention is specified in the Pool resource. I would search for all 
mentions
of retention here:

http://www.bacula.org/5.2.x-manuals/en/main/main/Configuring_Director.html#SECTION0022150000000000000000

> 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.

Decide how far back you want to be able to restore a file, then go from there. 

Two months?  Two years?  Decide that, then set your retention values.  You'll 
need to update your
resources, then update your Pools based on that, using the update command in 
bconsole.  But that you can ask about
later.

Read all that, then get back to the list with any questions.

> 
> Thanks in advance everybody and sorry if I feel like I am searching 
> information at the wrong place.


-- 
Dan Langille - http://langille.org


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