On Sunday 25 September 2005 00:24, Timo Neuvonen wrote:
> After some occasional experiments with Bacula, I finally started reading
> the manual (my printed version is for 1.36.0) page by page, my goal being
> to set up a decently working backup strategy instead of occasional backups.
>
> So far, my idea is roughly the following:
> - pool of 12 tapes, each of which should have a capacity for a one full
> backup, plus appr. 20 incrementals or deltas
> - nominally, the next tape would be taken into use in the beginning of
> every month
>
> Reasons behind this are minimal manual handling of the tapes, knowing there
> will be loss of up to one month's data if the current tape gets destroyed.
> I believe my tape drive (Exabyte VXA-2) could handle this.
>
>
> What makes things complicated (afaik), is that I wouldn't like to obey too
> strictly the schedule "new tape on the every 1st day of month". If I know
> in advance I'll be a few days out of the office, I propably would change
> the tape in advance -or late. Neither want I have a situation that the tape
> fills up, but it normally must be changed before this.  Manual ("going to
> vacation") shows a way to handle this, marking the tape "full" or "used"
> manually, so the recycling allows re-using the oldest tape although the
> previous one wasn't written full yet.
> - what is the command required to manually mark tape as "used"?
>
> I would find it extremely handy, that every tape would always *start* with
> a full backup, followed by a set of incrementals and deltas. However, this
> conflicts with the strict schedule above. What would be the most simple way
> to "synchronize" the backup schedule with the tape change? I mean, always
> in the night right after changing the tape (which would *not* happen
> exactly to pre-set schedule) a full backup would be run, followed by
> regular
> day-of-week based series of incremental and delta backups in the following
> nights (which would go on indefinitely, in practice up to eg. 25-40
> calendar days or 20-30 nightly backups) until the tape would be changed
> again.
>
> Easy way would be to manually run full backup job, and accept the extra
> incremental to run the same night afterwards (set to run with lower
> priority). However, this doesn't sound nice to me. Any idea how to handle
> this without too many console commands? I think occasionally I still had to
> delegate this to somebody else, with little experience of maintenance
> tasks, that's why the easy way would be a must... If a better way does not
> exist, is there possibly any scripting language available in the console,
> so the novice operator could call a more complex pre-written script by a
> single console command?
>
>
> Finally, provided I get everything else working as planned, are there any
> special risks related to reconstructing the catalog with the bscan command
> after a disaster? Since this way all I would ever need for a disaster
> recovery would be just a single (the most recent) tape, I'm wondering if
> there were no actual need to keep separate catalog backups or bootstrap
> files?

You will regret not keeping separate catalog backups as well as bootstrap 
files for the backup AND a bootstrap for the catalog backup.  Please see the 
last section of the Restore chapter of the development manual:
http://www.bacula.org/dev-manual/Bacula_Consol_Restor_Comman.html#SECTION0002111000000000000000

>
> --
> TiN
>
>
>
>
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-- 
Best regards,

Kern

  (">
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