Yes--I must look at virtual full backups in more detail. I remember thinking that they'll save some time at the weekends if I replaced the fulls.
I've had another look at volume retention and I think I understand it better now.
As far as I can tell, when volumes expire this just means they're marked for 'recycling'. So they will only be overwritten if the same job (each job has its pool in my set up) reuses it. As long as the file retention period is high (database size shouldn't be too much of a problem--it's only 100MB now, and I've been running for over a year) I shouldn't have any problems restoring files from older backups, even if a recent backup has been missed and the volume retention value has been exceeded by months.
I'll upgrade and start afresh with this idea. I still wish you could set the volume retention by number of jobs as well as a time though!
Many thanks for all the help I've been given.
Graham
> Date: Sun, 31 Jul 2011 20:29:00 +0200
> From: bacula-lists AT lihas DOT de
> To: gmjs AT hotmail.co DOT uk
> CC: bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
> Subject: Re: [Bacula-users] FW: Pruning/Purging and Volume Retention
>
> On Sun, Jul 31, 2011 at 06:24:11PM +0100, Graham Sparks wrote:
> > Thanks for that advice. I'll adjust the retentions and see if I can achieve what you described. Provided I make sure the full backups definitely run every month, this should be an adequate solution.
>
> If 'run' is a matter of hosts being reachable, you might consider
> VirtualFull backups.
>
> Regards,
> Adrian
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