Thanks for replying.
On my first point below, where you suggest the volume retention is too
low, the volume retention for the monthly tape backups to 12 months,
yet if I attempt to restore a file from a jobid of, say, last March
monthly backup, it is no longer in the catalogue, and I need to bscan
that monthly tape volume to repopulate the catalogue, so I can restore
a file. Is the fact that these are "copy" jobs overriding the
retention on the tape pools with the shorter disk pools retentions, or
can you expand on your suggestion that the retention is the problem.
On the second point, I understand that purging is the last resort, but
could not find an alternative. We have a tape autoloader with 8
slots. Every day we remove the tapes used that day and replace with
Scratch tapes. The problem is that Bacula never moves tapes back into
Scratch until it has none left. If it is writing the backups to tape,
and uses the last Scratch tape, it will then recycle an old tape
volume (presumably) and ask for manual intervention for someone to
insert this tape, hence the backups stop. Is there a way it can
recycle the volumes back into Scratch before the pool is empty, so the
admin has enough to refill the autoloader each day?
On the third point, I do use limits on the disk volumes, which is
forcing the recycling as you say, and this works well to stop bacula
causing the backup server to run out of space before it tries to
recycle, however, how do I do this for Tape volumes? If I set such a
limit on the tape pools, its hard to predict which ones it will
recycle, and hence it will stop and wait for manual intervention to
load the tape it has just decided to recycle. I think it needs to do
recycling earlier in the process, so that the Scratch pool is self
replenishing.
Appreciate your advice.
Dermot.
On 6 November 2010 23:30, Dan Langille <dan AT langille DOT org> wrote:
> On 11/5/2010 12:00 PM, Dermot Beirne wrote:
>>
>> 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?
>
> Your Job Retention is too low.
>
>> 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)?
>
> Purging is the last resort. If the scratch pool contains Volumes, they will
> be used.
>
>> 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.
>
> It sound like you need to set a limit on the Pool so Bacula starts to
> recycle Volumes. Bacula will not recycle Volumes if it is permitted to
> create new Volumes.
>
>>
>> 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.
>
>
> --
> Dan Langille - http://langille.org/
>
>
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