Maria McKinley wrote:
> I agree with Phil that if you look at the manual carefully, and know
> where to look, it's clear. However, as a newbie the bacula
> documentation can be a bit overwhelming and occasionally confusing. I
> think part of this is because the basic idea of having jobs and
> schedules and their interaction is not very clear to someone starting
> out. I'm wondering if adding something like this paragraph under the
> Understanding Pools, Volumes and Labels (maybe call it Understanding
> Jobs and Schedules) would help?
>
>
> In order to make bacula as flexible as possible, the "directions" given
> to bacula are broken into several pieces. The main instruction is the
> job resourse, which defines a job. A backup job generally consists of a
> fileset, a client, a schedule for one or several types/times of backups,
> a pool, as well as additional instructions. The thing that usually
> defines a job is what is being backed up, so typically each
> fileset/client combination will have one corresponding job. Most of the
> directives, such as pools and schedules, can be mixed and matched among
> the jobs. So you might have two jobs backing up different servers using
> the same schedule, the same fileset (backing up the same directories on
> 2 machines) and maybe even the same pools. The schedule will define
> what type of backup will run when (full on monday, incremental the rest
> of the week), and when more than one job uses the same schedule, job
> priority determines which actually runs first. If you have a lot of
> jobs, you might want to use JobDefs, where you can set defaults for the
> jobs, which can then be changed by the job itself, but saves rewriting
> the identical parameters for each job. In addition to the file sets you
> want to back up, you should also have a job that backs up your catalog.
> Finally, be aware that in addition to the backup jobs there are
> restore, verify, and admin jobs, which have different requirements.
>
>
> I think this would have helped me catch on to bacula faster, anyway. So,
> there is one data point. :-) Assuming, of course, that I have caught
> on. Please let me know if I got any of this wrong. Not sure how you
> guys go about adding to documentation, so also please let me know if I
> am going about this the wrong way.
All the above sounds like you've got it down pretty well. :) The one
detail you missed is that if you have multiple Jobs on the same schedule
at the same priority, the starting order is not necessarily defined.
Mine start in alphabetical order, but I don't actually know (haven't
ever tested to see) whether that's because that's how the Director does
it, or because that's the order they're defined in my configuration.
--
Phil Stracchino [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Renaissance Man, Unix generalist, Perl hacker
Mobile: 603-216-7037 Landline: 603-886-3518
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