Citando Heitor Faria <heitor AT bacula.com DOT br>:

Hi, I had a problem with space in my bacula server in May 2 so the jobs had to stay in the queue. In May 3 bacula should do a full backup but due to the space the job stayed in the queue and then failed. The next jobs starting to entering the queue too ending up in a long queue.

I solved the problem with space in May 23 and then the queue started to run again and in May 23 it started an incremental job scheduled to run on May 6. Since the full backup job failed and left the queue on May 3 then this incremental was upgraded to full. When the job finished the next one in the queue started, an incremental one that was scheduled to run on May 7.

Now the problem:
This new incremental backup was upgraded to full too even that the previous one was full. It appears that bacula considered the date of the jobs in the queue to decide if it should upgrade and not the date of the last full job. This ending up in bacula upgrading every incremental backup in the queue to full until May 23 (when I solved the space problem and the full backup was done) resulting in about 17 full backups in the same month.

Is this normal behaviour? Shouldn't bacula consider the date of the last full backup since the date the job is running instead of the date the job was scheduled?

Hello Rodrigo: yes, this seems accurate. Bacula can only perform incremental backups if it terminates successfully a backup from the specific client, with a given FileSet.

About the duplicated jobs that stalled you can avoid that with the Allow Duplicate Job=no directive.

Ok, I understand that bacula needs a full backup to perform incrementals, that's why it upgraded the incrementals to full.

But why it upgraded the other incrementals in the queue if the first incremental was upgraded to full?

How it decides if the next ones should be upgraded? Why it didn't compare with the date of the last full backup run since the current date instead of compare with the date of the last full backup run since the job was scheduled?

1. 03.May - Full backup is queued
2. 04.May - Incremental backup is queued.
   It's also checked that the previous Full backup (from 03.May) did/has not completed successfully and it's therefore upgraded to Full.
3. 05.May - Incremental backup is queued and upgraded to Full again.
4. Full backup from 03.May is completed.
5. Full backup (upgraded from Incr) from 04.May is started.
6. Full backup (upgraded from Incr) from 04.May is completed.
7. Full backup (upgraded from Incr) from 05.May is started.
8. etc