> 
> I would like to understand the way data flows in Bacula a bit better.
> Does the user data that is being backed up flow straight from the SD
to
> the FD? Or does the SD send the data to the director, and the director
> then sends the data on to the FD?
> 
> The reason I'm asking is that I would like to set up bacula to back up
> data locally on another site. Basically, I would like the director to
be
> on a computer in, say, San Diego, and both the SD and FD would be on
the
> same local network in, say, Los Angeles. The same director should also
> be able to control a similar SD/FD combination in Miami, New York and
> Seattle.
> 
> Obviously, that's not practical if all data has to flow over the
> Internet and through the director, but if the director only exchanges
> control information with SD and FD, it might be very practical. Thus
my
> question.
> 

The Director tells the SD to expect a connection from the FD, and the FD
connects directly to the SD for the purposes of sending backup data. I
think attributes (file information) are then sent from the SD back to
the Director for each file backed up.

I have done a setup similar to that before, with the Director in a data
centre and an SD in our office backing up servers in our office. It was
only a 512kbit/second link between the office and the data centre, which
was fine for the control connections between the Director and the FD/SD,
but when it came time to write the attributes back to the Director it
made the connection unusable.
 
Also, if your link is in anyway unreliable (eg some chance of dropping
for a second or two whilst the backup is running) then the entire
running job (or jobs if you are running concurrently) could be failed.

YMMV, but I ended up running completely separate instances of Bacula -
one in the office and one in the Data Center.

If Bacula could support a remote catalog server where the attributes
would be written from the SD directly to a catalog server that was local
to the SD but remote to the Director then this could work, although a
link failure would still fail the entire job.

James


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