Hello, I am considering putting a first cut of job consolidation into the next version of Bacula -- see item #3 on the y, Projects list "Merge multiple backups (Synthetic Backup or Consolidation)"
I'm considering the possibility of implementing it as a sort of sub-option of Migration and Copy jobs. The advantage is that virtually all the necessary code exists, and by using Migration and Copy, the Consolidate can either be a "move" or a "copy" operation. Currently, unless I am forgetting something, the "Level" field of the Migration and Copy is ignored. I'm considering to take it over and add two new level options: 1. Level = Consolidate 2. Level = Optimized Consolidate When either of these two levels are specified, Bacula would require a Selection Type = Job and Selection Pattern = xxx where xxx in the selection pattern *must* resolve to a single job name. Bacula would then search for the prior Full backup and all backups after that and consolidate them together producing an new Full job, the old jobs would be pruned if you were running a Migration and left untouched if you are running a Copy (note copy is implement in development branch). Finally the difference between a Consolidate and an Optimized Consolidate is that a Consolidate simply copies (or moves) all files previously backed up. This means that all the files in the Differential and Incremental jobs are will have a prior version most likely in the full, so the restore will be less than optimal. With the Optimized Consolidate, Bacula will read in all the meta data from the catalog, and ensure that only the most current version of any file is written. This requires a lot of memory (it needs to invoke the restore tree memory code) and takes some time, but it does produce optimized results. The other way of doing this is to define a new Type called Consolidate (or Optimized Consolidate) and write new code. The advantage that I see of doing it as a migrate or copy job is that later we may extend the code to permit additional features. For example, I could imagine that one might want to consolidate only part of the jobs (say all the incremental jobs, ...). I would appreciate comments on this. Best regards, Kern ------------------------------------------------------------------------- This SF.net email is sponsored by: Microsoft Defy all challenges. Microsoft(R) Visual Studio 2008. http://clk.atdmt.com/MRT/go/vse0120000070mrt/direct/01/ _______________________________________________ Bacula-devel mailing list [email protected] https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-devel
