When backing up to a hard disk, bacula treats each FILE as a volume,
rather than each disk. So, no, you can't do that. You could
theoretically configure bacula to use one file (i.e., volume) that fills
each complete hard disk, but that's a pretty bad idea.
In any case, if you want to use bacula, you probably are better off not
limiting it to just three or even six volumes. The problem with it that
you will run into problems with volume reuse/recycling. With hard disk
files, I found it is best to have only one backup job per volume for
full, and maybe two or three for incremental backups.
You could theoretically configure bacula to create a single file that
fills the whole hard disk. But if you do that, bacula will not even
start the volume retention time until the hard disk is full. So let's
say that you are backing up 200 GB for full backups on the first of the
month, and 2 GB for incremental the rest of the month. So that's 250 GB
per month, approximately. Your hard disk is, say, 500 GB. Let's say that
you want to keep the full backup for 6 months, and incrementals for 1
month.
Bacula would start using the first volume, say, Feb 1. February would
fill the volume close to half way. The March backups would also go onto
the same volume. Part of the full backup from April 1 would also still
fit (remember that bacula will split jobs across volume boundaries when
needed).
The second part of the April 1 full backup goes onto the next volume.
Here is the first problem with this scheme: if either of the two disks
fails, you lose at least part of the April backup. The rest of April, as
well as all of May and the June 1 full backup also fits on this disk.
But then the disk is full. So now bacula puts most of the June
incremental backups on the third volume. If the second disk dies at this
point, without the corresponding full backup, the incrementals are only
of limited usefulness. The July 1 and Aug 1 full backups also fit onto
the third backup disk.
Now at some point in the middle of August, the third volume will be
full, as well.
At this point, bacula is stuck. The retention time for volume 1 hasn't
expired yet - it expires October 1. That is because the retention time
is based on the longest rentention time of all the jobs in the volume.
In this example, the longest retention time is for the April 1 full
backup. Bacula can't selectively delete individual jobs from a volume -
it can only prune whole volumes. Even though there are 100 GB or so of
incremental backups that have long expired, and the Feb 1 and Mar 1 full
backups also have expired, the April 1 backup would prevent the complete
volume from expiring.
Bottom line: don't do it that way. For file-based backups, use one
volume per job so that bacula can prune each individual job as needed.
Personally, I'd say that if you have to be concerned about the extra 16%
disk space (that's all you'd lose with a six-disk RAID 5 array), you
probably don't have enough disk space to begin with.
That said, I see two options:
- You could create a single large RAID 0 disk - but then you risk losing
everything if any of the six disks fails.
- You could create six individual drives, similar to what you had in
mind. Each drive should have its own Storage resource configured. Then
create 18 pools - one per drive each for Full, Differential and
Incremental backups.
Now create schedule resources that rotate between the pools on a
regular, say, weekly or so, basis.
Mag Gam wrote:
> Hello All,
>
> We are planning to implement Bacula in our test lab for evaluation. On
> our backup site we have 6 x 750GB disks and I was wondering if I
> really need to RAID5 since this is a backup server. After skimming
> thru Bacula's manual, I noticed there are some sophisticated volume
> management techniques similar to TSM therefore I was planning to use
> each disk as a volume and create a storage pool. If the disk goes
> bad, it should be labeled as 'bad volume' and naturally the data will
> be gone. Once I get the disk replaced I would like bacula to rebackup
> the stuff I missed -- I am not too concerned about revisions and
> snapshots. Is this possible?
>
> My end goal is to use all of my storage and avoid RAID5 because it
> takes an extra disk away and this data is not that important.
>
> Any thoughts about this procedure?
>
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