Bacula-users

[Bacula-users] General questions after 1 year use

2010-11-05 12:34:55
Subject: [Bacula-users] General questions after 1 year use
From: Dermot Beirne <dermot.beirne AT dpd DOT ie>
To: bacula-users <bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net>
Date: Fri, 5 Nov 2010 16:00:04 +0000
Hello,
I have been using bacula now for 1 year this month, and it's been a
fairly smooth ride, but I have a number of questions that i'd be
grateful for some direction on:

Bacula version 3.0.2 on Ubuntu 9.04

1. I am concerned about my retention policy.  I have 4 disk pools and
4 corresponding tape pools.

All the disk pools (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly) have a volume
retention of 2 days and Volume Use Duration also 2 days

The Tape Pools are as follows:
Daily - 12 days
Weekly - 32 days
Monthly - 12 months
Yearly - never recycle

I am finding that when needing to restore from an old job, I have to
run bscan on the tape as Bacula says it has no records for that job in
it's catalog.
This is even for monthly backups.  Why can this be?

2. Use of scratch pools.
Every few weeks we have to print a list of the volumes (from the daily
and sometimes weekly tape pools), and manually purge (purge jobs
volume) anything older than the above retention times in order to
force them back into the Scratch pool, as the Scratch pool runs out of
volumes because Bacula is not automatically purging once the retention
policy expires.
Is there a fix for this?  Could this be causing/affecting point 1
above (i.e. doing manual purges)?

3. Disk pool structure.
I have 4 directories on my backup server for the Disk pools, Daily,
Weekly, Monthly and Yearly.  The Daily, Weekly and Monthly directories
are all in the region of 1.4Tb in size.  The problem is that the
server is near it's capacity of disk space, and I can't add any more
clients until I address this.  I feel the current structure is not
making the best use of the space.  The retention policy of 2 days on
the disk volumes is to allow a tape copy job to run the morning after
a nightly backup, and these tapes are then moved to a safe and
replaced with Scratch tapes in the autoloader.  It also allows us to
do a quick restore of a file that may have been deleted the previous
day, which is the most common restore request.

The space taken up by the weekly and monthly volumes is wasted, as
they have expired 2 days after use, but the space is still not
available to the Daily volumes.  I suspect I'd get a lot more clients
covered if I could change this.

Is it possible to have a single directory shared by all pools, and all
pools share and recycle the same volumes.  What are the pros and cons
of doing this, or is there a better way.

Is there any benefit in upgrading bacula to address any of these items.

I'm sorry for the long mail, and appreciate anyone taking the time to read it.
Advice welcome on how to proceed with Bacula from here.

Regards,
Dermot.

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