bacula - How do I setup up tape daily tape changes

neocontrol · 01-21-2008, 08:13 PM

So I've been hammering away at setting up my bacula server. Here's what I have so far.

I am successfully backing up about 10 servers.
They are backing up to tape.
I can do restores to an extent that I am happy with.
I get my email updates and such when intervention is needed, or things run correctly.

Know I'm on phase 2 which is fine tuning things.

Although, I'm not totaly happy with this backup policy, I need to do the following. I'm also open for suggestions as well.

I'd like to do full backups on Saturday Morning - 1am.
Sunday is an incremental - 1am.
Monday is an incremental - 1am.

On Monday I want the tape to be ejected afterwards, and for us to put in another tape.
Tuesday - Friday -- incrementals at 1am.
Pop tape out after friday incremental to do the weekend full/incremental

I'd really like to just do a full and incrementals for the week, and change tapes as needed, but I don't get the say so in this situation.

I don't need a how to line by line per say. But maybe just what elements I need to take care of.

Thanks for any insight.

jailbait · 01-21-2008, 08:28 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by neocontrol

On Monday I want the tape to be ejected afterwards, and for us to put in another tape.
Tuesday - Friday -- incrementals at 1am.
Pop tape out after friday incremental to do the weekend full/incremental

I'd really like to just do a full and incrementals for the week, and change tapes as needed, but I don't get the say so in this situation.

I think that your backup system is reasonable. Restores might be awkward. Suppose that it is late in the week, say Thursday, and you discover that you have lost a file, or to make it messy a complete directory with all of its files. What are the mechanics of the restore? Are you going to have to read through all of the tapes in sequence and restore each instance of the missing file(s) that you find? Or can you know which tape has the latest version of the file(s) and only look through that tape up to the point where you find and restore the missing file(s)?

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Steve Stites

neocontrol · 01-21-2008, 08:39 PM

The mechanics are too bad YET. We are only backing up about 20 GB a week, so if i span 2 tapes or so, it's not the biggest deal.

Later down the line, when I'm backing up some serious amounts of data, I'll try to get things changed. So for immediate, we are okay.

So to my question, looking for help on figuring out how the jobs should work, and pools.

neocontrol · 01-23-2008, 09:27 PM

Okay, I finally got my head around how to get the backups to run. Just had to change my server backups to be seperated by jobs, one set for full and the other for incrementals.

My next issue that I'm not to sure about is tape pools. If someone can give me a dumbed down version of how bacula tape pools work, what they are for, etc; I'd appreciate it.