Hi, I'm currently evaluating bacula, wether It can replace my home-grown backup software. I'm quite happy with bacula so far, yet there are still a few issues to solve. I've configured bacula to run disk-based backups in parallel, however, I'm not sure whether I've missed an option or I've stumbled across one or more problems.
I'm running 1.36.3 and have "Maximum Concurrent Jobs" on the following values: bacula-dir.conf: Director: 20 Storage: 15 Client: 1 bacula-sd.conf: Storage: 20 bacula-fd.conf FileDaemon: 20 So, every client with multiple Jobs isn't overloaded, but the backup server itself can stream multiple clients in parallel. I have a single pool with a single device of Type "File" configured with automatic labeling and Maximum Volume Jobs=1, so that each volume may be recycled as soon as possible. Now to the issues: -If two or more jobs start at the same time, they all do write to the same volume, although "Maximum Volume Jobs=1" is set. I assume that this option is only validated upon startup of a job and checks the number of already finished jobs per volume to guess wether the new job should write to the current or a new volume. However, this is likely to conflict with my idea of "recycle as soon as possible": if one full backup ends on such a volume together with many incremental jobs of other clients, any freed space cannot be reclaimed until the last file of this volume is expired/purged. I can circumvent Bacula's current behaviour by enabling Data Spooling, however, this also adds up 100% of IO load to the backup server, as each client is streamed to a temporary file and afterwards copied into a volume. I would expect Bacula to count the number of currently running jobs for this volume when starting a new job and ask the storage daemon to use a new volume for the next job, if the number of already running jobs per volume exceeds the configured limit of jobs per volume. -Maybe technically related to the first issue ... Assume I have one client writing to volume in my single file device, then I add a restore job which has to retrieve files from a different volume, but on the same device: the restore job is queued and will only start after the backup job has been finished. This behaviour makes sens to me if I were using a tape device, but one of the advantages for a file device with "Random Access = yes" should be that random and parallel access is really available. Have I missed an option? -a "true" Pool for disk-based backups: per bacula server, I have multiple disks on different mountpoints, as one disk isn't enough to store all backups. Currently, clients are tied to a volume pool, which is tied to a single device, so I'd have to manually rearrange clients every now and then. No, statically changing the destination pool from the scheduler is far from a good solution for this issue :-) As far as I can see from the documentation, I'd either have to make each mountpoint a single device and more or less strictly attach each job to an individual pool, which in turn has such a single device or otherwise have one device, manually create volumes and symlink them to the individual disks. My problem with the first way is, that one mountpoint will spill over, while a different mountpoint might have plenty of space left, so I'm left manually re-arranging and juggling with volumes - a work Bacula should do for me. The second way of solving this issue has the problem that I cannot use automatic labeling anymore, as any automatically created volumes would end up on the same soon-to-spill-over disk. I'd like to see a storagepool as a "true" pool: I configure multiple devices (each one being an individual mountpoint), add all of them to a single default pool and bacula literally grabs free devices and volumes from it as it wishes to do so. Such a behaviour would also help to spread backup load to multiple bacula servers: just have to add more storage nodes into the same pool. Am I missing a few options which make Bacula behave better in those subjects? Regards, Anders ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by the JBoss Inc. Get Certified Today * Register for a JBoss Training Course Free Certification Exam for All Training Attendees Through End of 2005 Visit http://www.jboss.com/services/certification for more information _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
