Hello, I've been using bacula for a couple years, backing up several servers to an HP DAT40x6 autochanger. It has worked great! However, I had a failure on my backup server and I've now rebuilt it, installing recent bacula versions, and an additional large hard drive.
So I now have a 500GB hard drive plus the HP DAT40x6 to work with. I may add another big drive as well, but I'm not sure if I should make it a 500GB RAID1 mirror, or just an extra 500GB drive for 1TB total space. I'm curious what others would do with this kind of configuration. I'm backing up about 8 servers, each with somewhere between 15GB and 30GB of data. I haven't really checked, but I'm guessing probably at least 1/4 if not more of the data on the servers changes regularly (big log files, databases, etc.) I like the approach described in the URL below, where there is a full backup on the 1st Sunday, differential on the other Sundays, and incrementals all the other days. And there is a retention cycle that makes sense. I'm not going to need nearly that long of a retention cycle, and certainly don't have the space for that, but I'm thinking of modeling my plan after this. http://bacula.org/rel-manual/Automated_Disk_Backup.html So, do you think I should back everything up to the disk, and then on a weekly basis backup the 500GB disk to the DAT40x6? Or somehow backup just the more recent backups to DAT on a weekly basis? Or do incremental tape backups of the 500GB disk every night? Or should I backup to tape from the original servers and backup to disk, instead of backing up to disk first, and then backing up the disk backups? I'm really not sure what approach is best. The idea is that I'd like to rotate between two sets of 6 tapes, with one set in the changer and one offsite. This is just in case of some sort of physical problem, like the building burning down. I realize the data could be up to a week old, but that is better than losing everything. Lastly, what about compression? I understand it is better to not use software compression on drives that do hardware compression themselves. The drive I have is supposed to do 20GB uncompressed and 40GB compressed. If I'm backing up to disk first, I want to compress it with software. But then if I backup those backup files to tape, what impact will the double encryption create? Also, any idea why I seem to only get about 17-18GB of data per tape, even though each tape is supposed to hold as much as 40GB? I've tried turning software encryption on and off. Do I have to do something to tell the drive to use hardware encryption? Thanks for the help! Tauren ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Using Tomcat but need to do more? Need to support web services, security? Get stuff done quickly with pre-integrated technology to make your job easier. Download IBM WebSphere Application Server v.1.0.1 based on Apache Geronimo http://sel.as-us.falkag.net/sel?cmd=lnk&kid=120709&bid=263057&dat=121642 _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
