[Bacula-users] Big Backups: Incremental forever, off-site.

Hello again, folk,

    I'm experimenting with volume management, and could use a few pointers on some of the recycling capabilities of Bacula when dealing with massive backups.

    What we're trying to accomplish, is an off-site backup solution. As such it has to be flexible, in case an Internet outage occurs or otherwise...

    We are keeping primarily smaller transfers, up to perhaps a Gigabyte of any given users Home folder data, but, there are a few servers and other systems we'd like to fully back up.

    The problem with this, however, is that our upstream bandwidth could take almost a whole month to perform a Full Backup for a really big file system, so as such, we want to approach this with a sort of "Incremental forever" strategy for the off site.

    Currently the files are being backed up to the server in-house for further testing, the server backs them up to disk.

    What I've watched is, once in a while, for whatever reason (maybe the user shut off their computer) if a network time out occurs - the Volume/Media for that users pool becomes in an Error state. When this happens, during their next scheduled back up, Bacula forces a Full Backup - claiming it has no records of a previous Full Backup (since the last Media it used was in an Error state).

    What I'd like to do is one of the following scenarios:

A) Ignore an error on Media during a backup, and continue writing anyway, using the Last Good Incremental as it's basis for the next Incremental backup.

B) Use the "Maximum Volume Bytes =" pool option, and limit the volumes to perhaps a few GB. Add a pile of volumes to this pool, and if one fails it only has to recover a few GB during an error, instead of the whopping 200GB (or whatever it comes out to).

C) Cancel a backup job during storage, and purge the incremental job files in question if an error like a network problem occurs. Leaving the Media in Append mode, so next backup schedule can run as normal again.

Can any of this be accomplished? Does someone have a better alternative for an off site type of "Incremental forever" solution?

Thanks in advance,

--

Shawn Qureshi
Artemide, Inc.
IT Specialist

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