On 2013-12-17 03:00 PM, Greg Woods wrote:
> There is some stuff I still don't understand here, and I'd like to
> avoid
> learning the hard way. For instance, I never realized that "File
> Retention" referred to the individual file records in the database, not
> to the actual files on backup. So I ended up losing many of my File
> records (learning the hard way), when what I really wanted was for the
> volumes containing those files to be made available for re-use when
> necessary. So now I *think* I have accomplished this by setting Job
> Retention and File Retention to 365 days, and Volume Retention to 30
> days. I would assume that, after 30 days since the last time a Volume
> was written, it will be available for recycling, but I won't lose the
> database records when that happens. In my case, I'm only using Bacula
> for a dozen or so systems and VMs at home as clients, so I'm not overly
> concerned with the size of the database.
>
> What good does it do to have database records for files that are no
> longer available, you may well ask? I use Copy jobs to copy my online
> backup media to my archive backup media. The former is just one big
> disk, the latter is a series of disks inserted in an external USB
> caddy,
> implemented with vchanger. I periodically run Copy jobs to copy backups
> from the main disk to the vchanger, so that if the main disk volume
> gets
> recycled, the files still exist on the vchanger. Since these are
> separate Pools, I can and do set the Volume Retention differently for
> each. But my impression is that the Copy jobs don't really create
> separate File records. File Retention seems to be set only on a per
> client basis, so if I want to be able to do full-feature restores from
> the vchanger, I need to keep the File records around even if the volume
> in the main backup Pool has been recycled.
>
> Am I understanding how this works correctly?
I don't know. There was a lot in the above and I couldn't parse it all
just now. Instead, I'll point you to something I wrote a few years ago.
If you have questions after that, please ask again.
http://dan.langille.org/2010/02/08/bacula-retention-periods/
Hmmm, now that I read that, it's pretty sparse.
Perhaps the Recycling Algorithm will help:
http://www.bacula.org/en/dev-manual/main/main/Automatic_Volume_Recycling.html
>
> Next question is about volume purging. How does Bacula determine when
> it
> is time to recycle a volume? Will it do this automatically after the
> Volume Retention period has expired? How exactly is the Volume
> Retention
> period measured? (Meaning, if I set it to 30 days, it's 30 days from
> when?) When a volume expires, does it immediately become unusable, or
> only when space is needed? When space is needed, will Bacula
> automatically use a volume that is past its retention period, or do I
> have to do something manually to make the expired volumes available?
Bacula purges a volume as a last resort. Just because a retention
period has passed does not mean the data is automatically removed.
Your reading on the Recycling Algorithm above should help there.
>
> Sorry to be so dense here. I have spent a lot of time reading the
> online
> docs, and I've been using Bacula since August, but some of this is
> still
> not clear to me.
With any feature rich product, there is always more than one can learn.
--
Dan Langille - http://langille.org/
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