James Harper wrote:

bacula with postgres 3.0.2
Postgre 8.2.13
Director & Storage Daemon on OpenSuse 10.3
Exchange on SBS 2003 with bacula-win FD 3.0.2 & exchange plugin

I am successfully backing up using the plugin but I may have
misunderstood the backup methods and their actions on the transaction
logs. If I am using an incremental backup of the Exchange Mail Store,
    

I
  

expected the transaction logs to be truncated from what I read of a
previous thread

    

http://www.mail-archive.com/bacula-devel AT lists.sourceforge DOT net/msg03029.
html

I had to change that behaviour - see below.

  

However an incremental backup does not truncate the logs, according to
the job log.

19-Oct 21:05 tal.airspeed.ie-dir JobId 406: Start Backup JobId 406,
Job=EinBackup.2009-10-19_21.05.00_15
19-Oct 21:05 tal.airspeed.ie-dir JobId 406: Using Device "FileStorage"
19-Oct 21:05 tal.airspeed.ie-sd JobId 406: Volume "Incr-0005"
.
.
19-Oct 21:22 ein.airspeed.ie-fd JobId 406: Did NOT truncate
database logs for Storage Group First Storage Group
.
.
  JobId:                  406
  Job:                    EinBackup.2009-10-19_21.05.00_15
  Backup Level:           Incremental, since=2009-10-16 21:05:03



Perhaps this is not the final implemented behaviour of the plugin? I
guess it does truncate on a Full backup, but still waiting for the
    

next
  

monthly to occur. Does the Differential instead truncate or is there
    

an
  

explicit parameter that one can pass into the plugin directive to
    

force
  

a truncate?

    

Because of the nature of Exchange, if a Differential or Incremental
backup were to truncate the logs then you would be unable to perform
another Differential backup - the logs would be gone.

That said, it wouldn't be hard to add an option to say "truncate on
incremental backups". There is already a "no truncate on full" option.
The user would have to understand the implications of specifying that
option though, eg if you specify the hypothetical "trunconinc" option
then it is no longer possible to run a differential backup and get the
results you expect - the differential effectively becomes an incremental
and restoring would be really hard.

More importantly, best practice would suggest that you keep your logs
around. It isn't unheard of for the Exchange database to break - if you
have an entire set of logfiles on disk since the last full backup then
you simply restore the database and Exchange takes care of replaying the
logfiles for you. It may be that if you have (say) a Full backup of the
database, and incremental backups of logfiles 100-199, and logfiles
199-299 are still on disk (because they haven't been backed up yet) then
it might also "just work", but I've not tested that... I'll have a think
about it.

Based on what I said above, are you still interested in a 'truncate logs
on incremental backup' option? Are you in a position to be able to test
it? I could give you a 3.0.3 fd with the Exchange plugin for you to test
if you want (or as close to 3.0.3 as my tree is right now) - for the
testing I've been doing a 3.0.3 fd works file with a 3.0.1 dir and sd,
but I'd not recommend it for production use.

James

  

 Patrick Tuite

 Network Operations Centre

 support AT airspeed DOT ie

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