Re: [Bacula-users] confused about differentials

On 12 May 2015, at 07:33, Radosław Korzeniewski <radoslaw AT korzeniewski DOT net> wrote:

why does the subsequent differential not appear to include any of them, given that it's supposed to be backing up everything changed since the last full dump (in my case, on 2015-04-19) ?

Well, it should. A differential backup level is backing up everything which was modified (or deleted when using accurate backup mode) since last full backup level.

Thanks for the confirmation.

The director is running on a CentOS 6 system and claims to be Bacula 5.0.0. The client is CentOS 7 and Bacula 5.2.x, but looking at the jobs for other systems they also seem to have inconsistencies like this.

It is unsupported configuration. Your any client (Bacula FD) version shouldn't be a newest version then Director/Storage.

This could be a core problem in your case.

I appear to be seeing the same problem with CentOS 6 / CentOS 6 combinations:

| 9,931 | srv-c601-backup | 2015-05-01 23:32:01 | B | I | 90 | 12,990,648 | T |

| 9,940 | srv-c601-backup | 2015-05-02 23:08:27 | B | I | 3,877 | 50,585,887 | T |

| 9,949 | srv-c601-backup | 2015-05-03 23:08:56 | B | I | 101 | 13,051,119 | T |

| 9,958 | srv-c601-backup | 2015-05-04 23:09:04 | B | D | 87 | 13,025,155 | T |

So the relative age of the Director and FD does not appear to be a factor.

Restoring the most recent full dump, the most recent differential and all subsequent incrementals definitely leaves a lot of files off the table. I've had a bit more success by restoring from all the jobs available in order, but unfortunately some of the earlier incrementals have been recycled so the data unique to them appears to be lost.

If you want to restore a recent backup of the client then you should use a p.5 of the restore command: 5: Select the most recent backup for a client. Then Bacula will compound a set of required jobs for you.

That's what I tried at first, as described in the paragraph you quoted; it left files out as described. Including all the available incrementals and differentials got me close enough to get the system back to functionality after a lot of "yum reinstall" to fill in missing system files. Fortunately the system was a relatively new one, and I keep a copy of /etc/ in Git as well.

First - UPGRADE YOUR BACULA DIRECTOR/STORAGE! it is more then 5 years old!!! :)

The headline version of packages shipped with enterprise distributions is often pretty ancient, that's the tradeoff you pay for stability.

I take your point, though, that the Director/SD should not be older than the clients, so I need to fix that. Fortunately the (virtual) machine running the Director and Storage daemons is dedicated to that task, so it should be relatively easy to build a new CentOS 7 machine to get 5.2.13.

I don't think I actually have a version mismatch problem (as I'm seeing the same issue with matched versions), but there are all sorts of reasons this might make my problem go away: there may be a bug in the version of 5.0 shipped with RHEL/CentOS, or I may have a configuration problem. Either way, starting from scratch and transitioning clients over may help.

In the meanwhile, I'll probably just stop using differentials.

Thanks,

-- Ian

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