>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?

You have to associate where the data was placed, literally as tapes are
finite in size and files shouldn't be infinite. It's a way to manage the
correlation.  Don't think that files are any different than tapes, they
have much the same limitations except for the obvious like wear.

>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?

The device doesn't have a size because that's limited by the volumes:)
What happens when you add more tapes/files and/or get bigger ones?
Device is just that, a device to write with.

>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.

All site specific, impossible to answer that. Should I expect to share the
same fileset between my Exchange 2010 boxes and my RHEL Clusters?

>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.

No, not designed specifically, again they are really the same, think that
way.

>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.

Not off topic, one has to learn at some point.

HTH,
jlc

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