On 8/8/25 15:02, Rob Gerber wrote:
If you think about the bacula disk "autochangers" as if they were
physical tape libraries with many tape drives onside each, it makes
more sense.
It would be impossible for Library A to send its robot to retrieve a
tape from Library B, since they are two separate units, quite probably
at different sites. In bacula, we prevent issues like this by usual
different media types for each autochanger.
The big concern I have is that if your inc pool uses either changer 1
or changer 2 for storage, even specifying media types 1 and 2 in the
autochanger won't prevent all issues. As it stands, I think once you
fix the media type issues, you'll have the jobs randomly choosing to
place volumes in changer 1 or changer 2. Sure, it won't ask changer 1
to give it a volume from changer 2, but when you do a restore you will
have to retrieve volumes from both changers, which strikes me as odd.
I can't imagine it's your goal to randomly interleave your backup jobs
onto two different autochangers. I can see wanting your job data to be
stored in two places, but not on a random basis.
The problem in a nutshell is that Bacula will choose one autochanger
drive (Device) to write to at job start time and will never ever change
that for the life of the job. The same applies to the read device for
Restore, as well as Copy/Migration/VirtualFull jobs. This method makes
it easier for the Bacula code to avoid race conditions when multiple
simultaneous jobs are competing for devices. Each autochanger must have
a unique media type so that Bacula will not attempt to select a volume
from autochanger 2 when the job has been assigned a drive on autochanger
1. That means that although it is possible to specify both autochangers
in the same Storage stanza, it is not feasible and will not work as
expected.
Also, the same is true for each drive specified in a disk autochanger.
Each drive must specify the same ArchiveDevice path in its Device
resource, or else it must specify a unique MediaType to prevent
impossible volume loading scenarios.
How to solve?
If your goal is multiple jobs simultaneously reading/writing to the same
physical disk, then a disk autochanger with multiple virtual drives all
specifying the same ArchiveDevice path is perfect. The number of virtual
drives is simply the max number of jobs you want to be able to run
simultaneously.
If your goal is to have a single pool of volume files that reside on
different physical disks, then I suggest using vchanger
(https://sourceforge.net/projects/vchanger/), which is designed to treat
multiple removable drives (RDX, USB, etc) as a single volume store so
that all volumes are available to all virtual drives, but it will also
work with fixed disk. Alternatively, use a single LVM volume spread
across multiple PVs and then use that as the ArchiveDevice for a disk
autochanger.
If the goal is to spread a client's or job's volumes across multiple
SDs, then I do not think it is possible, because the volumes would have
to have different Media Types and there is no way to assign multiple
write devices or read devices to a single job instance.
Do you want job data to be placed in BOTH places for each job? If so,
the way to do this is with a copy job ran after the first job, not the
way it is now.
Robert Gerber
402-237-8692
r...@craeon.net
On Fri, Aug 8, 2025, 1:53 PM Dragan Milivojević <gali...@pkm-inc.com>
wrote:
I believe the problem is that both have the same mediatype.
On Fri, 8 Aug 2025 at 20:35, White, Daniel E. (GSFC-764.0)[AEGIS]
via Bacula-users <bacula-users@lists.sourceforge.net> wrote:
I know WHAT is happening, just not WHY
I am hoping someone sees something obviously bogus in here.
Extract from bacula-dir.conf :
Autochanger {
Name = "Disk01-Incremental-Autochanger"
Address = "<SD Server Address>"
Autochanger = "Disk01-Incremental-Autochanger"
Device = "Disk01-Incremental-Autochanger"
MaximumConcurrentJobs = 10
MediaType = "DiskVolume"
Password = <redacted>
SdPort = 9103
}
Autochanger {
Name = "Disk02-Incremental-Autochanger"
Address = "<SD Server Address>"
Autochanger = "Disk02-Incremental-Autochanger"
Device = "Disk02-Incremental-Autochanger"
MaximumConcurrentJobs = 10
MediaType = "DiskVolume"
Password = <redacted>
SdPort = 9103
}
Pool {
Name = "Incremental"
ActionOnPurge = Truncate
AutoPrune = yes
LabelFormat = "IncVol-"
MaximumVolumeBytes = 536870912000
MaximumVolume = 20
PoolType = "Backup"
PurgeOldestVolume = yes
Recycle = yes
Storage =
"Disk01-Incremental-Autochanger","Disk02-Incremental-Autochanger"
StorageGroupPolicy = "FreeSpace"
VolumeRetention = 2 weeks
}
Extract from bacula-sd.conf :
Autochanger {
Name = "Disk01-Incremental-Autochanger"
ChangerCommand = "/dev/null"
ChangerDevice = "/dev/null"
Device =
"Disk01-Dev01-Incremental","Disk01-Dev02-Incremental","Disk01-Dev03-Incremental","Disk01-Dev04-Incremental","Disk01-Dev05-Incremental","Disk01-Dev06-Incremental","Disk01-Dev07-Incremental","Disk01-Dev08-Incremental","Disk01-Dev09-Incremental","Disk01-Dev10-Incremental"
}
Autochanger {
Name = "Disk02-Incremental-Autochanger"
ChangerCommand = "/dev/null"
ChangerDevice = "/dev/null"
Device =
"Disk02-Dev01-Incremental","Disk02-Dev02-Incremental","Disk02-Dev03-Incremental","Disk02-Dev04-Incremental","Disk02-Dev05-Incremental","Disk02-Dev06-Incremental","Disk02-Dev07-Incremental","Disk02-Dev08-Incremental","Disk02-Dev09-Incremental","Disk02-Dev10-Incremental"
}
Device {
Name = "Disk01-Dev01-Incremental"
AlwaysOpen = yes
ArchiveDevice = "/backups/Disk01/INCREMENTAL"
AutomaticMount = yes
DeviceType = File
LabelMedia = yes
MaximumConcurrentJobs = 5
MediaType = "DiskVolume"
RandomAccess = yes
RemovableMedia = no
}
... repeat 39 for times changing Name and ArchiveDevice as needed
Finally, the bacula.log extract showing the error:
30-Jul 03:00 <Bacula Server>-dir JobId 36: Start Backup JobId
36, Job=<Bacula Server>.2025-07-30_03.00.00_32
30-Jul 03:00 <Bacula Server>-dir JobId 36: Connected to
Storage "Disk02-Incremental-Autochanger" at <SD Server
Address>:9103 with TLS
30-Jul 03:00 <Bacula Server>-dir JobId 36: Using Device
"Disk02-Dev05-Incremental" to write.
...
30-Jul 03:00 <Bacula Server>-dir JobId 36: Storage
"Disk02-Incremental-Autochanger" was selected out of group of
2 available storages. StorageGroupPolicy "FreeSpace" used
30-Jul 03:00 <Bacula Server>-dir JobId 36: Connected to Client
"<Bacula Server>-fd" at <SD Server Address>:9102 with TLS
30-Jul 03:00 <Bacula Server>-fd JobId 36: Connected to Storage
at <SD Server Address>:9103 with TLS
...
30-Jul 03:00 <Bacula Server>-dir JobId 36: Created new
Volume="IncVol-0007", Pool="Incremental",
MediaType="DiskVolume" in catalog.
30-Jul 03:00 <Bacula Server>-sd JobId 36: Labeled new Volume
"IncVol-0007" on File device "Disk02-Dev05-Incremental"
(/backups/Disk02/INCREMENTAL).
30-Jul 03:00 <Bacula Server>-sd JobId 36: Wrote label to
prelabeled Volume "IncVol-0007" on File device
"Disk02-Dev05-Incremental" (/backups/Disk02/INCREMENTAL)
Termination: Backup OK
Note that Disk02 is used
Volume "IncVol-0007" created here
Subsequent jobs run and append to Volume "IncVol-0007"
03-Aug 03:00 <Bacula Server>-dir JobId 48: Connected to
Storage "Disk02-Incremental-Autochanger" at <SD Server
Address>:9103 with TLS
03-Aug 03:00 <Bacula Server>-dir JobId 48: Using Device
"Disk02-Dev08-Incremental" to write.
03-Aug 03:00 <Bacula Server>-dir JobId 48: Storage
"Disk02-Incremental-Autochanger" was selected out of group of
2 available storages. StorageGroupPolicy "FreeSpace" used
...
03-Aug 03:00 <Bacula Server>-sd JobId 48: Volume "IncVol-0007"
previously written, moving to end of data.
Now we get the error:
This time, the StorageGroupPolicy of "FreeSpace" picks Disk01 !
08-Aug 03:00 <Bacula Server>-dir JobId 65: Using Device
"Disk01-Dev06-Incremental" to write.
08-Aug 03:00 <Bacula Server>-dir JobId 65: Storage
"Disk01-Incremental-Autochanger" was selected out of group of
2 available storages. StorageGroupPolicy "FreeSpace" used
08-Aug 03:00 <Bacula Server>-sd JobId 65: Warning: mount.c:216
Open of File device "Disk01-Dev06-Incremental"
(/backups/Disk01/INCREMENTAL) Volume "IncVol-0007" failed:
ERR=Could not
open(/backups/Disk01/INCREMENTAL/IncVol-0007,OPEN_READ_WRITE,0640):
ERR=No such file or directory
08-Aug 03:00 <Bacula Server>-sd JobId 65: Marking Volume
"IncVol-0007" in Error in Catalog.
=============================
The volume's path is /backups/Disk02/INCREMENTAL/IncVol-0007
but Bacula is looking to write to
/backups/Disk01/INCREMENTAL/IncVol-0007
Here is the problem.
The same line
StorageGroupPolicy = "FreeSpace"
is in each JobDefs resource in bacula-dir.conf
Does anyone see a stupid mistake made on my part ?
Does anyone see a way past this mess ?
Thanks in advance.
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