Re: [Bacula-users] Cycling a USB drive - confused...

[Josh Fisher]

Kern Sibbald wrote: On Tuesday 13 December 2005 18:06, Dan Langille wrote: On 13 Dec 2005 at 16:51, Kern Sibbald wrote: Anyway, concerning Bacula working with these USB removable filesystems. The big problem is that Bacula doesn't understand what a removable filesystem is (except for DVDs) and hence expects *all* your Volumes to be online all the time. This makes me think about volumes being offlines in a tape drive... Yes, sort of, but for me, it is a bit more like multiple magazines in an autochanger ... I'm thinking about using the InChanger flag on removable media, but well that is something to do while I am on vacation in January ... My plan for tinkering with USB drives with bacula (in FC4) is to automount specific USB drives at unique mountpoints using udev, hal, and fstab-sync. If a particular USB drive will always be mounted at a particular mountpoint, then an SD device can be defined for each USB drive and there is a known directory to use as the "Archive Device". Otherwise, when using multiple USB drives of the same type their mountpoints, and indeed their /dev entries, will depend upon the order in which they are plugged in. I think this will allow bacula to use the USB drives as disk storage devices without any modifications to bacula, except for one problem. Assume volumes on the USB drive are forced to be manually created. What does bacula do when it gets a "file not found" error attempting to open an existing volume because the USB drive is not plugged in? If it asks for the volume to be mounted, then all is well and bacula will work out of the box. You plug in the USB drive containing the requested volume, the drive is automagically mounted at it's unique mountpoint,  and bacula should find it, right?