We're doing disk based backups over NFS to a NetApp so hardware
compatibility is not a concern. In no way are we switching to save money. I
just need something reliable. With Arkeia I'm lucky if scheduled backups run
consistently over 2-4 weeks before breaking.

Final questions (and I can pay if there's someone available for quick phone
support until we get setup):


1) Where should I send suggestions/feature requests? To the devel list?


2) YES/NO: Backing up concurrent jobs/clients requires the following in
"bacula-dir.conf", as well as the other confs, correct?

Director {
  .
  Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 10
  .
}


3) How should pools be defined for concurrent backups? Is there a problem
with multiple jobs writing to the same volume? Or do I need to have each job
write to a new volume (in the same pool) with "Use Volume Once = yes", or
"Maximum Volume Jobs = 1"? That doesn't seem to be efficient though. I'd
expect some option to "write job to a unique volume, but once that job is
done, another job can append" (to eliminate the interleaved volume blocks
issue with simultaneous jobs writing). If we're trying to keep the total
space used by a pool to 3 TB max, it doesn't seem efficient to use one job
per volume if the volume can't fill up. Recycling by max # of volumes won't
work (use space efficiently/keep as much data as possible) if the volumes
aren't full. And from what I can tell there's no "max pool size" option.

Anyone follow?

Here's what I have configured now:

Pool {
  Name = Weekly-Pool
  Pool Type = Backup
  AutoPrune = yes
  Recycle = yes
  Recycle Oldest Volume = yes
  Label Format = "Weekly-Volume-"
  Volume Retention = 14 days
  Maximum Volumes = 48
  Maximum Volume Bytes = 25000000000
}

Pool {
  Name = Daily-Pool
  Pool Type = Backup
  AutoPrune = yes
  Recycle = yes
  Recycle Oldest Volume = yes
  Label Format = "Daily-Volume-"
  Volume Retention = 14 days
  Maximum Volumes = 72
  Maximum Volume Bytes = 25000000000
}


Thomas Krwawecz III
--
Blue Gravity Communications, Inc.
3495 Haddonfield Rd, Suite 6
Pennsauken, NJ 08109

Toll Free: 1-877-8 HOSTING
Tel: (856) 662-9100, Fax: (856) 662-9101
Web: http://www.bluegravity.com


-----Original Message-----
From: Bob Hetzel [mailto:beh AT case DOT edu] 
Sent: Thursday, May 01, 2008 10:38 AM
To: Thomas Krwawecz III; Bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
Subject: Re: [Bacula-users] Migration from Arkeia, Other Questions

Thomas,

As others have suggested, you'll should probably use spooling, unless 
you're doing disk based backups. But if your spool directory is located 
on a busy disk (such as where the database lives, or temp stuff for the 
database) you may not help things.  In my case, to get spooling to work 
well I needed to create a raid-0 stripe set both to get enough clients 
spooling at the same time and to keep pace with my two LTO-2 tape 
drives.  In my case my raid-0 set is four 146 GB SAS 10,000 rpm drives. 
  I can do 8 concurrent backups pretty well.  The clients are all 
desktops and laptops so they can't go anywhere near as fast as my tape 
drive, hence another reason to do spooling.

The speed you get will depend heavily on the hardware involved.  If the 
clients have slow CPU or disk drives, filesystems with a million small 
files (i.e. a mail or web server) will go very slow.  Check the CPU load 
  on the clients being backed up. If they're pegged at 100%, then 
perhaps that's your bottleneck.  Likewise with the bacula server.  As I 
type this e-mail, my two socket dual core xeon 5160 backup server has 
load (from the uptime or top command) running between 9 and 10 which is 
rather high but since it's dedicated to backups that's ok.

Bacula's handling of many small files on my web server has shown an 
improvement over Veritas Backup Exec (v. 9.1) for me, but Backup Exec 
doesn't do spooling or concurrency in that version.  However I believe I 
saw an improvement even without spooling/concurrency turned on.

In short, pretty much any solution is going to cost some money to do 
well.  Even if you avoid the high license fees by going open source 
you'll find that the superior algorithms in bacula can't get around 
inadequacies of all the hardware involved (if any).  Unfortunately, that 
means that to compare performance of bacula with other systems you have 
to fully implement it.

> From: "Thomas Krwawecz III" <tom AT bluegravity DOT com>
> Subject: [Bacula-users] Migration from Arkeia, Other Questions
> To: <Bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net>
> Message-ID: <F3378DED79D440428FD8F90156DA39F7@TLK3HOME>
> Content-Type: text/plain; format=flowed; charset="Windows-1252";
>       reply-type=original
> 
> I'm wondering if anyone has migrated from Arkeia, and how much of a 
> performance increase was realized. I'm setting things up now and so far it

> seems to be much a better product. Fortunately the .ignoredir patch was 
> released earlier this month or that would have been a deal breaker. We 
> exclude hundreds of dirs from backup using this method.
> 
> We're backing up 50 (out of 200 potential) servers, 580 GB for a full 
> backup, on a GigE local network. A few servers have 1-2 million small
files 
> so we're looking for suggestions on how to speed up backups on these 
> machines. With Arkeia, they're taking 8 hours to finish. Feedback 
> appreciated.
> 
> One thing I'm having a hard time understanding. Can jobs run concurrently 
> (backup 25 servers at a time) to the same volume? Or is it suggested that 
> each job/client backup to its own volume?
> 
> Thanks in advance for any assistance. I'd love to contribute suggestions, 
> help, money, and/or hardware if this works out. These yearly "maintenance"

> fees are getting crazy for completely unreliable software. Not to mention 
> most companies are charging more money for larger VTL sizes - which I find

> ridiculous.
> 
> Thomas Krwawecz III
> --
> Blue Gravity Communications, Inc.
> 3495 Haddonfield Rd, Suite 6
> Pennsauken, NJ 08109
> 
> Toll Free: 1-877-8 HOSTING
> Tel: (856) 662-9100, Fax: (856) 662-9101
> Web: http://www.bluegravity.com
> 
> 
> 


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