On Wednesday 15 March 2006 08:27, Patrick Van der Veken wrote: > Kern Sibbald wrote: > > On Tuesday 14 March 2006 22:18, Patrick Van der Veken wrote: > >> Ryan Novosielski wrote: > >>> Are your JOBS set to expire soon enough to recycle the tape? There are > >>> per-job retention periods to contend with. > >> > >> Hi Ryan, > >> > >> I do not think this is relevant as the Bacula manual clearly states that > >> Bacula will always take the shortest of the all retention periods (Job, > >> File, Volume) into account? In our case, job retention is a year. > > > > This is probably not a very good idea (having a long job retention and > > shorter volume retention). The problem is that your jobs will not be > > regularly pruned from your volumes, so when Bacula wants a new volume, > > none will be purged and it will need to do volume pruning. At that point, > > with your setup there will be be a lot of work to do, which will slow > > down backups, and Volume pruning is not guaranteed to completely prune > > the volume if it exceeds the maximum pruning size that Bacula permits. So > > failures like you are seeing might occur. > > Hi Kern, > > Now I am getting pretty confused. The Bacula manual states (under > "Catalog Maintenance"): > > "As mentioned above, once the File records are removed from the > database, you will no longer be able to restore individual files from > the Job. However, as long as the Job record remains in the database, you > will be able to restore all the files backuped for the Job (on version > 1.37 and later). As a consequence, it is generally a good idea to retain > the Job records much longer than the File records." > > So what is the recommendation on Job/File/Volume Retention?
Under most circumstances I can think of, any commercial shop should attempt to retain volumes with Full backups for at least a year. In most cases where I have heard of pruning problems, users are running on what I call the "hairy edge" expecting their volumes to be recycled very quickly in a short period of time (days). I would recommend a Volume retention of 1 year, a Job retention of probably 6 to 9 months, and a File retention of 30 to 90 days depending on your needs. If you try to compress all that into 10 days, it should work, but I could imagine problems running out of recyclable volumes. > Keep them > all in sync? What is the "maximum pruning size" you refer to? Bacula attempts in most cases to limit the maximum memory it uses (the exception is a full restore tree). There are several places where the memory is limited for doing pruning. It would require a careful study of the code to give more details. > Does this for e.g. that Verify jobs are not pruned from the Volume? Verify jobs should not be on the volume. In any case, Verify jobs are pruned using the same rules as for backup jobs. One needs to be careful about terminology since data is pruned from the catalog not from Volumes. A Volume can be pruned from the catalog. When all the catalog records referring to the Volume are pruned the Volume can be recycled ... > > Regards, > > -- > Patrick Van der Veken > Qtris BV ------------------------------------------------------- This SF.Net email is sponsored by xPML, a groundbreaking scripting language that extends applications into web and mobile media. Attend the live webcast and join the prime developer group breaking into this new coding territory! http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=110944&bid=241720&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
