On Feb 3, 2013, at 1:42 PM, Nasos Nikologiannis wrote:

> I have a Bacula test setup running in order to decide about volume rotation before migrating to production.
>
> The setup includes multi pools with volume rotation, one pool per client per backup type (full, differential, incremental).
>
> I observed that although I change the Volume Retention period to another (shorter) value, that doesn't reflect neither to actual volume rotation mechanism nor
> to actual volumes number written to the disk (storage daemon). Maximum Volumes directive doesn't seem to work either.
>
> The Volume Retention period for a client with incremental backup type was initially set to 20 minutes that resulted 5 Volumes given that the job was set to run every 5 minutes.
> After changing the Volume Retention period to 10 minutes, Bacula kept rotating the same 5 Volumes as before ignoring the change (I restarted the director daemon just after the change to be sure).
> I also tried to set Maximum Volumes directive to 3 but this was also ignored.
>
> Is the above behaviour normal? I also want to ask what is the purpose of Maximum Volumes directive, given that the volume rotation is managed exclusively by Volume Retention period
> (Volume Retention period decides when to start recycling the volumes).
>

Yes, this is expected behavior if you have not run the update command.

Run it in console to refresh:

* the pool definition
* the volume characteristics from the pool

Keep in mind: a Pool definition contains the parameters to be used when a Volume is created.  Thereafter, it has no effect on that Pool.  Consider the Pool definition to be template, not a set of common parameters.

--
Dan Langille - http://langille.org