Hello,
I got no response to my last mail below, so I'll try and summarise my
questions a little:
(Bacula 3.0.2 on Ubuntu 9.04)

1. If I copy a backup job, is the retention period of the original
backup job or the copy backup job used by bacula.  I ask because my
originals (disk) have a 2 day retention, but their copies (tape) have
up to 12 months, but are still not kept in the catalogue and I need to
use bscan to restore them.  What do I need to check/change?

2. Is there a way Bacula can recycle tape volumes back into Scratch
before the pool is empty.  Without purging volumes, the Scratch pool
runs out.

3. I currently have Daily, Weekly and Monthly disk volumes, which are
copied to tape within a few hours of backup, and have a retention of
just 2 days to keep space from running out on disk.  The Daily disk
backup now needs more space, and can't recycle the weekly or monthly
disk volumes as they are in different pools in different directories.
Hence over 2 TB of disk is inaccessible to the Daily jobs, even though
those volumes have expired.  Is it possible to have all 3 backup types
share and recycle the same disk volumes, in one directory with the
same naming scheme, but for the copy job to still know which is a
daily, weekly, monthly disk volume so it can apply the required
retention to the tape volume?  This would allow much better use of
disk space.

4. The writing from disk to tape appears very slow.  Is there a
document/thread somewhere that will help me troubleshoot or benchmark
the autoloader throughput (Dell P124T) 

Thank you for any info.
Dermot.

On 9 November 2010 10:07, Dermot Beirne <dermot.beirne AT dpd DOT ie> wrote:
> 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/
>>
>>
>

------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Centralized Desktop Delivery: Dell and VMware Reference Architecture
Simplifying enterprise desktop deployment and management using
Dell EqualLogic storage and VMware View: A highly scalable, end-to-end
client virtualization framework. Read more!
http://p.sf.net/sfu/dell-eql-dev2dev
_______________________________________________
Bacula-users mailing list
Bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users