Hi,

06.11.2008 17:34, Erik Logtenberg wrote:
> I would very much like to see the possibility to make only incremental
> backups, no more full backups required.
> 
> The main point is to (dramatically) decrease the needed bandwidth, which
>  makes the difference between being able or not to use Bacula for
> relatively large storage devices on relatively slow internet connections
> (with relatively few changes/day), like almost all of my backup targets.

Synthetic full backups or consolidation. A feature that is in the 
development queue and could (in my opinion) be one of the major new 
things in a 3.1 release, i.e. perhaps next year.

To learn more, search the bacula-devel list archive for subjects 
containing "Synthetic" or "Consolidation" - you'll find that, if 
someone invests money or programmer's time, this project could be started.

> Ofcourse Bacula can do this if you simply never cycle the original Full
> Backup and retain *all* incremental backups since the beginning, but
> this is not what I mean.

This is, also, usually not what you want unless you use "accurate" 
backups, available in the current development version (because a 
normal incremental backup doesn't know about moved or renamed files).

Arno

> I mean sort of like rsnapshot does (using the
> --link-dest option of rsync). That way you need only incremental
> backups, but you end up with essentially a collection of full backups.
> Backups that are even extremely disk space efficient. And you can delete
> as many of them as you like, without harming the other copies.
> 
> So why not simply use rsnapshot then, if that's so perfect? Well, it
> isn't that perfect. Bacula has some great advantages with regards to
> scheduling, reporting, the separation of sd, fd, dir and console,
> filesets, etc. So implementing a "--link-dest" kind of feature in
> Bacula, *that* would be perfect :)
> 
> I saw some discussion on this topic about one month ago, between Eli
> Shemer and Dan Langille, but I haven't heard a follow-up since.
> Nevertheless if something like this could be built, it would make me
> very happy :)
> 
> Kind regards,
> 
> Erik.

-- 
Arno Lehmann
IT-Service Lehmann
Sandstr. 6, 49080 Osnabrück
www.its-lehmann.de

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