Heitor Faria <hei...@bacula.com.br> wrote: > > I have a 12 tb disk array and I use the disks individually > (since my boss dont want to use RAID). Each disk is a single > storage for Bacula (but it makes addministration a little bit > complex). Is there a way of using all disks volumes as a single > Bacula storage? I think it would be a nice feature.
I built a dedicated Bacula SD box from a 2U Intel-branded server. It has 12 x 1TB SATA drives, and boots off of an IDE solid state disk. After fighting with all kinds of issues trying to push those RAID controllers past 2TB LUNs, I gave up and formatted each of the 12 drives as a standalone file system. Since I'm using this SD as a ring buffer and expiring the oldest virtual tape (vtape), what I did was to tell Bacula to create/label 96 new vtapes in a /vtape folder on the solid state boot drive. Each one is set for a maximum size of 115 GB, and the size was chosen because it could fit onto an LTO tape in an emergency if we needed to vacate the backup disks for some reason. Each of the 12 1TB disks is mounted on the root of the SSD drive as well, as /disk1 - /disk12 . Having the [blank] virtual tapes created, I then moved the file for vtape1 to /disk1, vtape2 to /disk2, all the way up to vtape12 onto /disk12. From there, I started over again, moving vtape13 to /disk1, all the way up to vtape96 onto /disk12. (I was thinking that I'd like to spread the tape dates out, so that a single drive failure wouldn't wipe out a week's worth of backups if the vtape files were copied sequentially to the drives. I'm not advocating one way or the other, but this is how I did it. It may make more sense in your local environment to use larger vtape files, copy vtape1-vtape8 to /drive1, vtape9-vtape16 to /drive2, or maybe even use another scheme, but considering how you will handle a drive failure is something to consider since there's no RAID in place.) When I was done, there were 8 vtapes on each physical drive, and Bacula didn't know how to access them any more. The fix was quite simple...symlink from each vtape's original location to it's new one!!! As long as Bacula does not need to create a new vtape volume, the SD seems to happily follow the symlinks to the relocated virtual tape files in both Bacula 2.x and Bacula 3.x. I actually have two of these SD boxes now, operating as headless appliances stashed in network edge wiring closets 1km and 3km away from our main server room. Although I haven't tried it, I imagine that symlinks could be used in a similar way with removable/USB hard drives, as long as the symlink pointed to the proper vtape files when the drive was mounted. Of course, you might be better off using LVM or a vchanger, but symlinks have been working fine for me in what sounds like the same environment you're trying to build..... -Arthur ------------------------------------------------------------------------- Arthur Emerson III Email: emer...@msmc.edu Network Administrator InterNIC: AE81 Mount Saint Mary College MaBell: (845) 561-0800 Ext. 3109 330 Powell Ave. Fax: (845) 562-6762 Newburgh, NY 12550 SneakerNet: Aquinas Hall Room 60 ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
