Bacula-users

Re: [Bacula-users] Strange issue with backup size

2013-04-04 04:23:22
Subject: Re: [Bacula-users] Strange issue with backup size
From: Radosław Korzeniewski <radoslaw AT korzeniewski DOT net>
To: Alberto Caporro <a.caporro AT consulthink DOT it>
Date: Thu, 4 Apr 2013 10:20:24 +0200
Hello,

2013/4/4 Alberto Caporro <a.caporro AT consulthink DOT it>

Hi everybody,

I've just completed a Bacula deployment within our infrastructure and run through the first backups; while all of them have completed without any error, one of the jobs gave results that I find puzzling.

I backed up our mail server, which is hosted in a virtual machine with two virtual disks sized at 20G and 200G respectively. I'm only backing up relevant files (/etc, /root and /opt) and measured on the server itself, the total size amounts to slightly more than 56G.

The backup job ends with a total size of 145G, which is clearly wrong; the total number of backed up files is however correct, standing at 400k+.

Check what files were backuped with "list files jobid=xx" bconsole command and compare it with list of expected files. It is very plausible that you have more files on backup then expected. In this case you have to tune your FileSet definition.

Another case could be a sparse files. If you have a very large sparse file (or files) i.e. 10GB file which allocated only a few MB on disk then Bacula will backup 10GB instead of a few MB. To avoid this you should add "sparse = yes" option to the FileSet definition. Then Bacula will try to detect a sparse space (all zeros) and do not backup this data but an information about sparse block only (a few bytes). Bacula sparse detection handle 64kB blocks only (a whole 64kB block has to be all zeros to mark it as a sparse block).

best regards
--
Radosław Korzeniewski
radoslaw AT korzeniewski DOT net
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