I would appreciate any help from anyone that has dealt with this specific aspect implementing or using Bacula.

My Situation:

I successfully deployed Bacula v5.0.3 on CentOS 5.5 on a 32bit Intel-based system in a production environment. Jobs were running great and backing up as scheduled. I set my expiration and pruning to 21 days for my files. Bacula’s BSMTP was sending me emails nightly telling me that my jobs were all working great. The Webmin interface for Bacula is pretty nice to so that is what we chose to use to admin it. I set max volumes to 100 as Kern’s documentation states to. I set my volume size to 50GB.

Well apparently I did not have enough disk space on my Bacula director/storage server (800GB on a RAID5) because the disk space filled up and things vapor locked on me. During examination I figured out that I ran out of disk space before the 21 day pruning kicked in. So I blew away the volumes and started with a new /etc/bacula/bacula-dir.conf file. To try and save on disk space I cut my retention period down to 10 days. I decreased my volume size to 20GB too. I also set Bacula to create/label its own volumes using the prefix Vol, so when it creates new volumes they will be Vol0001, Vol0002 and so on. It seems to be creating volumes when it needs them.

My Question:

I want to know is Bacula is smart enough to see once it goes past the 10 day point pruning point, does it know to start reusing the oldest volumes again, and only creating additional volumes when absolutely necessary? You know…like the way you would recycle physical tapes if you were backing up to tape instead of disks. Or will Bacula continue to load my array up until it gets fat like a tick again and crashes due to “disk space full”? Obviously we want the system to work as hands off as possible.

Anyone that can help me answer, please know that your help will be greatly appreciated, and that anything I can do to help you too, I absolutely will as well. Thank you.

Respectfully,

Larry Kemp
Operations & Network Manager
US Metropolitan Telecom, LLC
Email:      larry.kemp AT usmetrotel DOT com
Address: 24017 Production Circle Bonita Springs, FL 34135
Adtran ASP/ATSA Internetworking, IP Telephony, & Wireless