On 3/11/26 12:38, Bill Arlofski via Bacula-users wrote:
On 3/10/26 4:49 PM, Rob Gerber wrote:
>
I think anders intends to use a usb drive as if it were a tape, and
use it to carry his full backup offsite.
I believe I saw a project somewhere to use multiple hard drives as
tapes. Some sort of autochanger idea, but applied to hard drives.
A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away, I wrote a very long and
very retailed How-To about using Bacula with removable eSATA drives
with full LUKs encryption, along with udev, autofs, and Josh Fisher's
awesome vchanger tool.
I haven't had a chance to work on it in years, but vchanger still works
just fine with recent versions of Bacula. I've used it daily for many
years as is. I use it with udev rules that launch scripts to perform
'update slots' commands via bconsole whenever a USB drive is attached /
detached. A script for generating the udev rules is packaged with
vchanger. For offline backups, I use periodic Copy jobs to copy the
latest fulls to an Offline pool, with all volumes in that pool on one
set of USB drives. After the Copy jobs finish, I just unplug those
drives and store them in a fire safe. Another pool named Offsite and its
set of USB drives are used with Copy jobs and hand carried to an offsite
location semi-annually.
The concept is pretty simple. It implements Bacula's autochanger API
just like a shell script for a tape autochanger would, so Bacula treats
it exactly the same. A USB drive (or eSATA or whatever) emulates a tape
caddy containing N slots for tapes, just like a tape autochanger's tape
caddies except that a USB drive has a dynamic and unlimited number of
slots. And unlike a tape autochanger, a vchanger autochanger can have an
unlimitted number of caddies inserted. Each file is a data volume and is
written by Bacula in exactly the same way as a tape. A virtual drive is
simply a symlink to one of the files on one of the USB drives. The
number of virtual drives is unlimitted (as many as you want to define in
bacula-sd.conf). Scaling is limitted only by hardware, still it was
designed for small business and home use where tape autochangers are
cost prohibitive due to the up front cost of the hardware and require
more expertise to operate and maintain than USB drives.
It was served from my company website, but that no longer exists.
A little while ago, I had someone find it on the Wayback Machine:
https://web.archive.org/web/20110914192752/http://www.revpol.com/node/140?page=1
The formatting is completely gone, but it looks like the information
is in tact.
Hope this helps!
Bill
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