On 11/5/2010 12:00 PM, Dermot Beirne wrote: > Hello, > I have been using bacula now for 1 year this month, and it's been a > fairly smooth ride, but I have a number of questions that i'd be > grateful for some direction on: > > Bacula version 3.0.2 on Ubuntu 9.04 > > 1. I am concerned about my retention policy. I have 4 disk pools and > 4 corresponding tape pools. > > All the disk pools (Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly) have a volume > retention of 2 days and Volume Use Duration also 2 days > > The Tape Pools are as follows: > Daily - 12 days > Weekly - 32 days > Monthly - 12 months > Yearly - never recycle > > I am finding that when needing to restore from an old job, I have to > run bscan on the tape as Bacula says it has no records for that job in > it's catalog. > This is even for monthly backups. Why can this be?
Your Job Retention is too low. > 2. Use of scratch pools. > Every few weeks we have to print a list of the volumes (from the daily > and sometimes weekly tape pools), and manually purge (purge jobs > volume) anything older than the above retention times in order to > force them back into the Scratch pool, as the Scratch pool runs out of > volumes because Bacula is not automatically purging once the retention > policy expires. > Is there a fix for this? Could this be causing/affecting point 1 > above (i.e. doing manual purges)? Purging is the last resort. If the scratch pool contains Volumes, they will be used. > 3. Disk pool structure. > I have 4 directories on my backup server for the Disk pools, Daily, > Weekly, Monthly and Yearly. The Daily, Weekly and Monthly directories > are all in the region of 1.4Tb in size. The problem is that the > server is near it's capacity of disk space, and I can't add any more > clients until I address this. I feel the current structure is not > making the best use of the space. The retention policy of 2 days on > the disk volumes is to allow a tape copy job to run the morning after > a nightly backup, and these tapes are then moved to a safe and > replaced with Scratch tapes in the autoloader. It also allows us to > do a quick restore of a file that may have been deleted the previous > day, which is the most common restore request. It sound like you need to set a limit on the Pool so Bacula starts to recycle Volumes. Bacula will not recycle Volumes if it is permitted to create new Volumes. > > The space taken up by the weekly and monthly volumes is wasted, as > they have expired 2 days after use, but the space is still not > available to the Daily volumes. I suspect I'd get a lot more clients > covered if I could change this. > > Is it possible to have a single directory shared by all pools, and all > pools share and recycle the same volumes. What are the pros and cons > of doing this, or is there a better way. > > Is there any benefit in upgrading bacula to address any of these items. > > I'm sorry for the long mail, and appreciate anyone taking the time to read it. > Advice welcome on how to proceed with Bacula from here. -- Dan Langille - http://langille.org/ ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ The Next 800 Companies to Lead America's Growth: New Video Whitepaper David G. Thomson, author of the best-selling book "Blueprint to a Billion" shares his insights and actions to help propel your business during the next growth cycle. Listen Now! http://p.sf.net/sfu/SAP-dev2dev _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
