Bacula: Understanding its Pool Resources

I back up about 20 different data sets daily. Each set exists on a separate machine somewhere on our network. I struggled a bit to get Bacula to do what I wanted it to do. Maybe I was looking at the problem wrong, but I felt as though I should formulate my own back up strategies and work with Bacula's configuration to devise the tactics. It seems that you should strategize around Bacula's common usage to make it easier on yourself. Bunk! Bacula does the job, but you need to understand the configuration settings well to get Bacula to do what you really want it to.

First, the pool resource section of the bacula director configuration is a good place to start. This is the stuff I monkey with the most.

My strategy (not thinking about how Bacula does things). I want the following:

1. on the first Monday of the month I want a FULL backup of all data sets.
2. on the 3rd Monday, I want a differential backup everywhere
3. every night other than those two, I want incrementals done.
4. I want a pool for each machine (each data set).
5. I want a maximum of 2 volumes written for each data set
6. the data set will be a month of backups (FULL backup, incrementals, differential, incrementals)
7. once 2 volumes are written out in the above nature, I want the oldest volume recycled. This gives us 2 full months of backups, at best and 1 full month backup at worst, depending on where we are in the backup cycle.

To make this happen, you must do the following:

1. set your "Maximum Volumes" to 2 for all the pools (in pools resource section of bacula-dir.conf)
2. set your "Volume Use Duration" to 1 month.
3. set your "RecycleOldestVolume" to yes
4. set your "Recycle" to yes
5. set your "Purge Oldest Volume" to no
6. set your "AutoPrune" to yes
7. I recommend letting bacula auto-name your Volumes. I mean the pool has a descriptive name, so who cares what the volume is named? So set "LabelFormat" to "vol"

Then g'head and fire off your backups for a month. Then come back to the config and change one setting once your pools each have 2 volumes written in them. In this case 32 days after starting your backups. In bacula-dir.conf change the setting for "Purge Oldest Volume" to yes by doing the following:

1. edit your bacula-dir.conf file for each pool and restart the bacula director.
2. update each Volume in the already written volumes to honor this by issuing a "update volume" at the bconsole and changing this parameter for each volume.

Now you have a self-rotation backup schedule that will maintain itself, more of less.