Maintenance, Administration Jobs and special Jobs

• 1. Autopruning
  • 1.1 Autopruning and Manual Pruning
  • 1.2 Disabling Automatic Pruning
  • 1.3 Notes
• 2. Tape Drives: update slots/label
  • 2.1 Labelling tapes
  • 2.2 Sample output
  • 2.3 Notes
• 3. How to configure an SD to SD copy

1. Autopruning

1.1 Autopruning and Manual Pruning

Bacula’s long-standing default behavior has been to perform pruning automatically at the end of a job run or when Bacula needs to recycle a volume. On many Bacula deployments this is usually fine and does not interfere with normal operations. However, with larger deployments with several millions of files, pruning can take a long time, and can possibly hold up other jobs.
Additionally, there have been some race conditions detected when volume pruning was being done while backup jobs were running. This is especially true in large environments, and even more so if truncation is being performed.
The recommended solution for medium and large environment (more than 50 clients and millions of files) is to disable automatic pruning everywhere, and perform pruning at a quiet time in the backup schedule.
There are three main resources, on Director side, where automatic prune is configured in Bacula:
• the Job{} resource
• the Client{} resource
• the Pool{} resource
For a Job{} resource, there are three directives used to configure automatic prune:
• Prune Jobs = (default is no)
• Prune Files = (default is no)
• Prune Volumes = (default is no)
For Client{} and Pool{} resources, there is only one directive used to configure automatic prune:
• AutoPrune = (default is yes)
If automatic prune is disabled in these resources (AutoPrune = no) and the directives Prune Jobs, Prune Files or Prune Volumes are set to y. .e.s in a Job{} resource, it will override the settings in the Client{} resource (for Jobs and Files) and in the Pool{} resource (for Volumes), .

1.2 Disabling Automatic Pruning

In order to disable automatic pruning of jobs and files, you should:
• In Job{} resources, avoid the usage of Prune Jobs = yes and Prune Files = yes.
• In all Client{} resources, configure AutoPrune = no. In order to disable automatic pruning of volumes, you should:
• In the Job{} resources, avoid the usage of Prune Volumes = yes.
• In all Pool{} resources, configure AutoPrune = no.
Once your Jobs, Clients and Pools have all been edited, you must tell the Director to reload its configuration:
Please run the following command to validate your modifications

1.3 Notes

• When a volume is pruned, all the jobs and files associated to this volume are pruned as well.
When a job is pruned, all the files associated to the job are also pruned. If you have your job and file retention greater than your volume retention, your jobs and files will be pruned as soon as the volume associated to it is pruned.
• The pruning process is closely related to retention period configuration. Bacula will only prune jobs, files or volumes where their retention time has expired. There is one exception: a volume can be pruned and reused by Bacula if there are no more jobs and files associated to it in the catalog, even if the volume retention time has not expired. Please check “Schedule and Retentions” (cf. 3.3 on page 8) section of this guide for retention period recommendations.
• If a single Pool{} or Client{} resource has an Autoprune = yes set, auto- matic pruning is activated.

2. Tape Drives: update slots/label

2.1 Labelling tapes

If you want to use Tape Autochangers, please consider labelling them by barcode. Normally you can throw new Volumes into the “Scratch Pool” where other Pools with the same mediatype can collect them, when enabled as a directive. You can assign them directly to a given Pool if you prefer.
If you have a second drive that is idle during the label command, it should be chosen automatically. Assuming that your 1st Drive (drive=0) is busy with backups, you can, in this case, use your 2nd drive of your library . If not chosen automatically, you can select the 2nd drive by using “drive=1” in the command line. When changing tape cartridges in your Library by adding, removing Tapes or changing slots numbers you should issue an update slots command within bconsole.
Please be aware that some Libraries might unload a used cartridge to any other free slot, if the selected slot for unloading is currently occupied.

2.2 Sample output

Assuming new tapes are in slots 30,29,28,16,14, you should choose a Pool, Storage and Slot(s) (drive), otherwise you will be prompted interactively.

2.3 Notes:

If using a Library without barcode support you can issue the commands without the “barcode” keyword, however scanning the tape media for a label will then take much longer.

3 How to configure an SD to SD copy

A copy job, as its name indicates, creates a copy of an already existing backup job. This can be used to change retention policy, storage media and/or where the data is physically stored. Bacula detects whether the reading and writing devices are in the same storage daemon and proceeds accordingly. In this case, the storage daemon currently holding the data to be copied acts as a client to the destination storage daemon.
Suppose these device definitions in bacula-dir.conf:

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