Hi,
28.04.2009 02:31, Steven Palm wrote:
> On Apr 27, 2009, at 2:00 PM, Arno Lehmann wrote:
>> I'd suggest to just back up that pool with a very plain setup.
>> Accurate backups will be good, probably.
>
> My only questions is, given it's extensive use of hardlinks to
> minimize the pool size, if there anything special needed when backing
> it up to tape to minimize storage space on tape much like is done on
> disk.
No. All I know about hard links is that Bacula needs some space for
the necessary bookkeeping, but storing those on disk is nothing very
exciting. It's more or less just like a hard link on disk - just a
pointer to a full version of the file in question.
> I guess I need to investigate this a bit more... I guess I was
> thinking that surely someone had actually done it before and was
> hoping for a "tested" answer. But maybe not, because if someone has
> gone through the process to understand Bacula enough to use it, they
> probably don't use BackupPC any longer... :)
Possible :-)
Though, actually, I have a customer who's collecting data from a
number of distributed servers with rsync or similar and backs up that
pool of stuff with Bacula.
>> Should work, though I haven't used virtual fulls yet. Especially
>> regarding pool and volume management, virtual fulls can be a bit of a
>> challenge - for simplicity, I'd suggest to use a more straightforward
>> setup at least to get started with Bacula. You can refine your
>> procedures later on anyway.
>
> I think it is going to be complex on the setup, but hopefully simple
> for the usage...
That's the idea, yes.
> If it works properly, then you'd pretty much have
> just one "full" backup for each system, because after a successful
> incremental or differential to update things, it would roll back into
> a current "full". I just think it would probably require some
> scripted stuff after every backup to handle this (or nightly), and
> probably shuffling things from pool to pool or volume to volume to
> keep it straight.
Just my point - I need to get a bit more experience with this (and the
developers are considering a change to the logic in Bacula, so I
decided it wasn't worth extensive experimenting yet).
> That's why it's puzzling to think about as I am just
> trying to learn the basics. You are quite right, I need to get a
> simple system in place first. :)
>
>>> The notes on page 10 of the Concepts document talk about the Copy
>>> job, and give a sample config, but I think part of it is missing...
>>> It mentions a "Storage = vtl" without any storage definition. I
>>> suppose if I were familiar with bacula, I'd know what to put here,
>>> but
>>> I do not.
>> Ignore it for now, it will become clear once you've got a real Bacula
>> setup.
>
> I asked because I thought that would be required to eventually get
> where I want to go.
Well, that's just an arbitrary storage device definition. Nothing
extraordinary involved.
> The real problem here is the fact that until I get this working, we
> will have no backup mechanism in place, so I'm not really keen on the
> idea of fiddling around for a long time to learn. I wish I had the
> luxury of setting up a test environment for a few weeks or months, but
> I can't afford that. However, I think the things I am trying to use
> are fairly new additions to Bacula, so maybe it's not likely anyone
> has a tested implementation to share configs from.
At least that's the case for me. Others I know about are using
migration, copy and virtual fulls for a while already, and I don't
think there were more complaints than was to be expected whan using
beta software.
> It makes me nervous to trust only a disk backup here without being
> able to dump to tape, especially since I can't take the disk-based
> server offsite. :)
That's the spirit... unfortunately, among many users, disk backups are
considered the best thing today, though the advantages of being able
to remove a tape and store it wherever you like should be quite clear.
> Also, I am accustomed to having a set of tapes
> daily, or weekly at the worst case, to take offsite that contain full
> backups. I'm having a hard time picturing how differentials and
> incrementals all fit together into the picture of how we've done
> things and cover us with offsite daily/weekly dumps.
I think it's really more simple than you expect...
- Do backups to disk with whatever cycles you like. For simplicity,
use only one pool.
- Create a virtual full in a disk based pool.
- Copy that job to tape, to another pool.
- Move the virtual full volume(s) to the original backup pool.
- Start from the beginning.
As far as I know, there is some scripting required. I'm pretty sure I
could implement it in a few days (including extensive testing), but I
don't have a proven solution yet.
...
> It may take months before I understand that. :)
Ok, so forget this for now.
> I'm sure it's
> elegant, but again, I've always only rotated the backups so that daily
> (M-Th), Weekly (F, unique for each week) and monthly tapes were all
> full dumps so that any one could be taken offsite and have a full set
> of data. That is probably why I am fighting all the stuff documented,
> because I don't want to deal with all the incrementals/differentials
> when it comes to the daily tape storage... For disk storage, that
> would be great, but when I take a tape set out of the drive I want it
> to be complete.
See above - I think the solution isn't overly complex.
But, given your concerns with roaming users, I would probably suggest
doing an rsync-based (or BackupPPC-based) backup to disk first, and
just create full tape backups of that data as needed. A more detailed
investigation, looking at data set sizes, available bandwidth, backup
windows, disk capacity etc. would be needed before I set up something
like this, though.
Arno
>
> Thanks, really, I appreciate it!
>
> Steve
>
>
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Arno Lehmann
IT-Service Lehmann
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