> To get recycling to work most likely your hard drive will need to be
> divided into multiple volumes

        That doesn't sound very efficient.

> or you can do this with 3 or more hard
> drives each containing 1 volume. The vdisk changer will help in the

        For testing purposes only, I will be using maybe two or three
different sized hard drives, all 1T or less.  Once it goes into production,
the backup set will be at least 10 - 20 drives, perhaps more.  The array
will soon exceed 10T, and I expect it to be beyond 20T by Q1 or Q2 2011.
While the main array will hopefully soon be composed of all 3T drives, the
backup set does not need to be (and probably won't be) composed all of
drives of a uniform size, and when I purchase a drive to augment the set, it
will be the drive with the best cost / byte.  Sometimes this will be a 1T,
or often a 1.5T.  Assuming 2 T drive prices continue to fall, there may even
be some 2T drives in the mix, and maybe even eventually some 3T drives.
Forcing uniform configurations (such as partitions) on the drives will not
be effective

> case where you have few hard drives with multiple volumes on them. In
> this case each drive can be considered an autochanger magazine
> containing a fixed number of volumes. When you swap out drives, you
> tell bacula by the update slots command.

        What, exactly, do you mean by "swap out drives"?  There will never
be more than one backup hard drive online at any given time.  When you say
"swap out a drive", do you mean, "take one offline and bring another
online", or do you mean, "erase the contents of a drive to free it up for
use by newer backup sets"?  This system is primarily a video server, so the
latter will rarely, if ever, happen except when starting fresh with a brand
new full backup.  Out of 8T (eventually probably over 30T), only a few
megabytes worth of files will ever undergo modification, so the incremental
data will take a very, very long time to overflow even a 1T drive.


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