Hi -
I've spent the better part of a week here going through Bacula
documentation, going through the quick start, and acquainting myself
more with Bacula. I've known of Bacula for years now. I've tinkered
with it in the past, so for this latest project I had a considerable
head start than what I've had in attempts prior.
Now, I need to implement Bacula.
Sheepishly, I'll admit, that throughout my professional career I've
never taken on backups because it was largely "somebody else's job".
Unfortunately, now, that seems to be biting me in the ass. I'm
familiar with technical concepts of backups, why they're needed, what
they do, how long they live - heck, I even make my own backups, but in
a much simpler process than Bacula provides. Simple tarballs on crons
obviously isn't good enough for me because I know at this point in
time I know I need to consider something more robust, flexible and
long-term such as Bacula.
I've familiarized myself to the point where I know what basic
components are - director, storage daemon, file daemon, I know what a
job is, I know what a schedule is, I know a job uses a pool and a pool
is comprised of volumes. I'm familiar with *Bacula* enough to
understand how it works, but not familiar enough with some more
fundamental basics of "backups" as a whole and that's got me hanging.
Why do we use volumes? It sounds like a silly question, but it's
genuine. Is it so a backup can span several media types? Tape, file,
disk, Pandora's box, what? Why do I care about volumes and how long
they're retained, how often they're pruned, recycled, or what type
they are?
Why doesn't a Device (in my labs, I'm only using the File media type)
have properties to define how large it is, rather, it's parent Volume
specifies that? Why would I not want to back up to a Volume instead
of a pool?
How often can I expect to use the same Fileset or Schedule for similar
machines? What kind of flexibility are people dealing with when
specifying something one-off, concatenating Filesets, mixing
Schedules, flipping between Pools. Is it more or less common for a
Job - which would be specified one-per-backed-up-machine - to share
Schedules and Filesets? I understand this is a loaded question, but
I'm looking to figure out some of those "in practice" hypothetical
questions that I've got in my mind.
Granted, I can see how and understand why Bacula was designed with
tapes in mind. Maybe a source of my confusion stems from the fact
that maybe Bacula was almost designed specifically for tape backup,
which I'm not using.
I know these questions might seem kind of petty, in fact, maybe even
inappropriate for this list. I know I'm going to get a lot of "read a
book" responses, but I've specifically crafted these questions to
answer some much more specific questions, and I think I'll have most
of the pieces to the puzzle figured out.
The Bacula manual provides an incredible wealth of information. I've
not once ever seen a piece of software documented so well. It
describes the details of each command and directive in much greater
depth than anything I've ever seen. As far as I'm concerned, it's
deserving of a Pulitzer. It does, however, assume a fair amount of
knowledge on the reader's behalf with regards to how one should
*properly* preform backups. I know there's no definitive answer; it's
a loaded question. What I'm after is some feedback on how and why I
should care about some of the minor (extrapolated as major, in due
time?) details in my configuration.
Thanks for taking the time to reading this message, and I look forward
to getting some good feedback in the next few days.
Thanks
-dant
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