In the message dated: Mon, 10 Nov 2014 09:31:41 -0300, The pithy ruminations from =?UTF-8?Q?Ana_Em=C3=ADlia_M=2E_Arruda?= on <Re: [Bacula-users] Configuration reload for bacula-sd> were: => ------------------------------------------------------------------------------
=> Kern, => => In spite of Bacula do not need different Media Types when using different => LTO generations in tape libraries, I really think that it could be a best => practice for working with LTO tapes to have the LTO tape generation => specified in storage device definition. Just because of compatibility It would be great if Bacula was enhanced to add more intelligence to the definition of storage devices, including specifying a list of media types that the storage device can use 'read+write' or use 'read-only'. => have an LTO-3 drive working with LTO-3 catridges and you upgrade your => hardware to an LTO-5 drive that will not write to your LTO-3 catridges That's close to our situation, as we have gone from LTO2 -> LTO3 -> LTO4. => because of compatibility. If you just specify "Media Type = LTO", Bacula Even more confusing, when we began using Bacula, we had just LTO2 drives & media, so all the initial media was labled "LTO2". When we upgraded to LTO3, we had the choice of correctly labling the new media as "LTO3" and then losing access to all our LTO2 media since Bacula cannot deal with multiple media types in a single SD, or deliberately incorrectly labling our LTO3 media as "LTO2", or using multiple SD definitions for the same physical tape drives. We chose to label all our media (LTO2, LTO3, and LTO4) as "LTO2" within Bacula. We use printed barcode labels to name each piece of media, and are using a convention where the first non-zero digit in the name is the LTO type. For example, tape 004079 is an LTO4 tape, while 003134 is LTO3 media. This makes it easy for human beings to distinguish the actual media types. => will try to read and write to all the LTO-3 and LTO-5 catridges and this => will no work. Is there another way of distinguishing different LTO catridge => generations? Normally I have been using this way: having two storage device Our solution has been to to label all media as "LTO2", but to set the actual LTO2 tapes as "read-only" within Bacula. => definitions for the same drive, each one working with an LTO catridge => generation. I dislike that idea, as it will cause problems with backups. For example, if a backup job begins with LTO3 media, loaded into a drive under the LTO3 definition for that SD, and the remaining available cartridges in the tape changer are LTO4 media, then the backup will wait on operator intervention until an LTO3 tape is supplied, rather than using one of the LTO4 tapes. => => Best regards, => Ana => -- Mark Bergman voice: 215-662-7310 mark.berg...@uphs.upenn.edu fax: 215-614-0266 http://www.cbica.upenn.edu/ IT Technical Director, Center for Biomedical Image Computing and Analytics Department of Radiology University of Pennsylvania PGP Key: http://www.cbica.upenn.edu/sbia/bergman ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ _______________________________________________ Bacula-users mailing list Bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
