Bacula-users

[Bacula-users] Automatic Tape Recycling

2012-07-25 09:57:40
Subject: [Bacula-users] Automatic Tape Recycling
From: Sven Tegethoff <tegethoff AT udobaer DOT de>
To: bacula-users AT lists.sourceforge DOT net
Date: Wed, 25 Jul 2012 15:55:38 +0200
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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