To sum up: Bacula itself is built with the assumption of one device per job (or pool). You can't "just" list multiple devices in the Storage (or Pool or whichever) section and have bacula fill each up in turn. Your options are:
1. Schedule individual jobs to specific disks. You can replace the disks
as they get full, plus potentially this lets you backup multiple clients
(jobs) in parallel. The downside is complexity of the config files, esp.
considering 2.a. You may be looking at maintenance nightmares down the line.
2. Combine all disks into one device (at raid, lvm, or filesystem
level). Downsides:
a) cheap large-capacity hard drives come with fairly high failure rates
so you have to be careful with how you do it or lose all of your backups
to a single-drive failure;
b) if your retention policy requires storing more backups than fit on
your "one device", you have to add migration/archive jobs and media, and
then your configuration gets complex fast.
On the plus side it works very well if you can get enough raid-5 or 6
space to store all the backups you need. The whole thing then becomes
fully automated, with no manual intervention ever.
3. Use "fake autochanger" like vchanger to emulate a tape jukebox where
many tapes get loaded into only one drive -- typically, the "device"
("drive") here is a symlink pointing to the "currently loaded" disk.
This is the middle ground: somewhat simpler than #1 to configure, and
lets you pull the disks as they fill up like they're tapes.
Note that 2.a still applies to #1 and #3. Since bacula doesn't natively
do RAIT either, you have to fake it with a copy job for each of your
backup jobs. #3 gives you more flexibility there: you could set up
another "autochanger" with only a couple of disks for the copies, and
have those overwritten automatically.
--
Dimitri Maziuk
Programmer/sysadmin
BioMagResBank, UW-Madison -- http://www.bmrb.wisc.edu
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