bacula and recycling tapes

[tqz]

Hello all

Currently I have bacula backing up the contents of my server on a daily basis (Mon-Fri) on to a tape. There are in total 9 backup tapes so far. One for each day of the week (Mon-Thurs) and one for every Friday in the month (so there are 5 friday tapes). The tapes are all from the same pool and once the tapes are full they should then get recycled.

As I understand and from what I have seen, the data from my server backups up to the tape and is then marked with the append status. Every time that tape is used, data is then appended onto the tape until the tape is full. At this point it is marked as full but wont be recycled until all the tapes from the pool are marked as full (so until all 9 tapes are full).

My question is, is there a way of overwriting the data on the next backup on the tape, rather than appending or requiring that all tapes in a pool are full before a tape can be recycled. As the mon-thurs tapes currently cant be recycled until all the Friday tapes have been used.

Hope im making sense so far.

The reason why I dont have seperate pools for the Friday backups and the other days of the week or even seperate pools for each day of the week, is that if a tape is accidently not changed or someone puts in the incorrect tape by accident a backup will still occur. Which is better than no backup!

Thanks in advance for any help, or suggestions!

t.

[Irithori]

You could try and set a low retention time on the monday-thursday tapes. e.g.: 5 days
and a relatively high one on the friday tapes: 4weeks.

In theory, if both a fri and a mo-thu tape is marked "append" in the catalog (after "recycle" and "pruned" of course), then bacula will prefer the mo-thu tape.

Still, this is a hacky (and crappy) way of "solving" this.
If both retention times happen to be over, its still a gambling if a mo-thu or fr tape is prefered.

Clean solution imho:
Get a 12slot tapelib and define 2 pools

[tqz]

Hi Irithori and thanks again for your response! Much appreciated as always!

Hmm Going to try and see if setting the retention period of the Fri tapes to a longer period i.e. at least 2 weeks and edit the configuration to ensure that the tapes only get used once before being recycled to see if this works...

Will update thread with results...