Hi everybody,
I've tried to wrap my head around automatic volume recycling, but it
seems that my backup strategy isn't quite compatible with Bacula's
volume recycling policy, and maybe there's someone out here who knows a
solution :)
I'm backing up multiple systems with multiple tape drives. For each
storage, I have a series of tape pools in a classic daily/weekly/monthly
backup schedule. Tapes are physically being swapped out every day and
stored off-site, which is a requirement. Now, daily tapes are supposed
to get overwritten every week, weekly tapes every month, monthly tapes
ever year. So far so good, I've got all pools set up with appropriate
retention periods so tapes get marked as recycleable in time.
Now my problem is that bacula always leaves the last tape in
"appendable" state, and when the tape gets inserted for its next write
cycle, it will not overwrite this tape, but only append to it - even
though the retention period of the tape has expired.
The manual makes very clear that this is intentional, but it's not what
I need, and not what I want, especially if the backups going to one
particular pool consist only of one single tape. I really don't want to
double the number of tapes, and on the other hand, I also don't want to
manually have to update all obsolete, but still appendable volumes.
The whole process should be as automated as possible, so the operator
only has to swap out the tapes in time, with no further manual
intervention.
I thought I could solve the problem by setting the maximum volume use
time to a value that is equal to its retention time - but the volume use
time will only be updated AFTER a job has finished, and never BEFORE a
job gets started. So the first job in the new cycle will always be
appended to last week's backup, no matter what I do.
And ideas how to solve this problem in an elegant way? Or am I just too
stupid to read the manual? :)
Best Regards,
Sven
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