On 6/5/2015 6:17 AM, Jogi Hofmüller wrote:
Dear all,

We recently bought two identical HP Ultrium 448i tape drives.  We want
to use them with Bacula and found the white paper "Best Practices for
Disk Backup" [1] that describes how to configure a virtual autochanger.
  We applied the necessary changes in order to model our two drives
combined in one virtual autochanger and tried it with a backup job that
needs more than one tape.

No. That is not possible. When a job starts up, it is assigned a Device resource (from bacula-sd.conf) to write to. It is not assigned to the Autochanger resource, but rather one of its Device resources (ie. one of the tape drives). This assignment happens only once at job start. Once the device is assigned, Bacula then begins selecting volumes to use in THAT device.But it will not change devices in the middle of a job.

Using two tape drives in a virtual autochanger will work, though. It is fine for running concurrent jobs without having to manually configure jobs to spread the load, but it will not allow big jobs to span tapes without operator intervention.


Bacula used the first tape as expected but when in came to use the
second tape it requested the second tape to be mounted in the first
drive although the tape was correctly mounted in the second drive.

Now I would like to ask the experts if it is possible to make a setup
like I described work and if so, what we did wrong so far.  We are
currently using bacula 5.2.6 from Debian stable (8.0 aka jessie).  So
far we have been using bacula with one drive for the past 10 years or so
and did not have any problems.

Here are the relevant portions of our configs:

<bacula-dir.conf>

Storage {
   Name = TapeChanger
   Address = 127.0.0.1
   Password = "03292ab58a34fc3895a70a0d6581581c6105a5fd"
   Device = Virtual
   Media Type = Ultrium2
   Autochanger = yes
}

JobDefs {
   Name = "DefaultJob"
   Type = Backup
   Client = hamster-file
   FileSet = HomeBackupFileSet
   Messages = Standard
   Storage = TapeChanger
   Priority = 10
}

Job {
   Name = "BackupFiles"
   JobDefs = DefaultJob
   Schedule = DailySchedule
   Pool = WeeklyPool
   Write Bootstrap = "/var/lib/bacula/BackupFiles.bsr"
}

</bacula-dir.conf>

<bacula-sd.conf>

Autochanger {
   Name = Virtual
   Changer Device = /dev/null
   Changer Command = ""
   Device = virtual-0, virtual-1
}

Device {
   Name = virtual-0
   Media Type = Ultrium2
   Archive Device = /dev/nst0
   Device Type = Tape
   AutomaticMount = yes
   AlwaysOpen = yes
   RemovableMedia = yes
   Autochanger = yes
   Drive Index = 0
   Volume Poll Interval = 15
   Autoselect = yes
}

Device {
   Name = virtual-1
   Media Type = Ultrium2
   Archive Device = /dev/nst1
   Device Type = Tape
   AutomaticMount = yes
   AlwaysOpen = yes
   RemovableMedia = yes
   Autochanger = yes
   Drive Index = 1
   Volume Poll Interval = 15
   Autoselect = yes
}

</bacula-sd.conf>


Thanks for any input on this matter!

[1]  http://blog.bacula.org/whitepapers/CommunityDiskBackup.pdf

Cheers,


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