I'm using Bacula 5.2.6 (packaged by Debian; 5.2.6+dfsg-9) with vchanger 0.8.6 (compiled myself, not packaged) on a set of removable SATA drives, and a 4-slot SATA dock. I think it's stable now (the latest hurdle was figuring out how to enable the port multiplier feature on the eSATA port on the storage server). I haven't been using it for long enough to be sure that there won't be problems as things get to the steady-state (e.g. that volumes will actually begin to expire before I run out of space on the removable drives). The drives vary in size a bit (some are 1TB and others are 3TB) and perhaps that will cause pain later.
Anyway, I now need to get a few more things organised. 1. Manual backups The use case is for very large data which changes so rarely that a manual backup is sufficient. My assumption is that I should define a job for this which backs the data up to a separate pool, so that I can manually label the volumes in a vchanger disk & associate them with that pool, so that none of the scheduled backups need that disk, and so that it doesn't matter that I temporarily need to use all the slots in the SATA dock (temporarily displacing the disks used for scheduled backups) to perform the manual backup. Any pitfalls (apart from low space utilisation of the disks for that pool) here? 2. Offsite backups I'd like to make sure that my backups (especially full backups) are geographically diverse. As a minimum, I would like to maintain the invariant that every machine has at least two full backups not more than N days old, in separate locations. Obviously I will need to do the physical moving of the disks (i.e. removing some disks to a remote location, manually), but in terms of configuration, how do I get Bacula to establish and maintain this kind of invariant? I'd prefer for this not to require the backups for the "offsite" versions to be manual, because I'd like to keep the process as fast for the operator (myself) as possible. Waiting around for a manual full backup just so that I can pull the disk and take it out of the building is a definite no-no (since the backups take long enough for this to be annoying). Can I get Bacula to tell me when to remove a specific removable disk and take it offsite? 3. Physical Disk labelling I understand how volumes get labelled when they're tapes. I understand something about tape barcodes. But, presumably at some point Bacula will want a particular volume to be available for a backup. What's the most useful way to associate volume names with physical media so that I can locate the correct physical disk to insert? Manually specifying a volume name prefix for all the vchanger volumes on a disk, and physically labelling the disk with that prefix? What do you do yourself for labelling removable disks? Just in case it helps, I attach the relevant Bacula configurations.
bacula-dir.conf
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bacula-sd.conf
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vchanger-1.conf
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