I'm using Bacula  5.2.6 (packaged by Debian; 5.2.6+dfsg-9) with
vchanger 0.8.6 (compiled myself, not packaged) on a set of removable
SATA drives, and a 4-slot SATA dock.   I think it's stable now (the
latest hurdle was figuring out how to enable the port multiplier
feature on the eSATA port on the storage server).  I haven't been
using it for long enough to be sure that there won't be problems as
things get to the steady-state (e.g. that volumes will actually begin
to expire before I run out of space on the removable drives).   The
drives vary in size a bit (some are 1TB and others are 3TB) and
perhaps that will cause pain later.

Anyway, I now need to get a few more things organised.

1. Manual backups
The use case is for very large data which changes so rarely that a
manual backup is sufficient.  My assumption is that I should define a
job for this which backs the data up to a separate pool, so that I can
manually label the volumes in a vchanger disk & associate them with
that pool, so that none of the scheduled backups need that disk, and
so that it doesn't matter that I temporarily need to use all the slots
in the SATA dock (temporarily displacing the disks used for scheduled
backups) to perform the manual backup.   Any pitfalls (apart from low
space utilisation of the disks for that pool) here?

2. Offsite backups
I'd like to make sure that my backups (especially full backups) are
geographically diverse.   As a minimum, I would like to maintain the
invariant that every machine has at least two full backups not more
than N days old, in separate locations.   Obviously I will need to do
the physical moving of the disks (i.e. removing some disks to a remote
location, manually), but in terms of configuration, how do I get
Bacula to establish and maintain this kind of invariant?   I'd prefer
for this not to require the backups for the "offsite" versions to be
manual, because I'd like to keep the process as fast for the operator
(myself) as possible.   Waiting around for a manual full backup just
so that I can pull the disk and take it out of the building is a
definite no-no (since the backups take long enough for this to be
annoying).  Can I get Bacula to tell me when to remove a specific
removable disk and take it offsite?

3. Physical Disk labelling
I understand how volumes get labelled when they're tapes.   I
understand something about tape barcodes.  But, presumably at some
point Bacula will want a particular volume to be available for a
backup.   What's the most useful way to associate volume names with
physical media so that I can locate the correct physical disk to
insert?    Manually specifying a volume name prefix for all the
vchanger volumes on a disk, and physically labelling the disk with
that prefix?   What do you do yourself for labelling removable disks?

Just in case it helps, I attach the relevant Bacula configurations.

bacula-dir.conf
Description: Binary data

bacula-sd.conf
Description: Binary data

vchanger-1.conf
Description: Binary data

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