Re: Very long retention time

On 2024-08-14 14:21, Mehrdad Ravanbod wrote:
> Thanx for the response, appreciate it
> 
> As to media, plan is to put it on disk, with some sort of raid(1, 5, 6) 
> to ensure safety/integrity, that is where the files are right now
> 
> as to the amount of data, it is not that huge, weekly full backups is 
> around 50 GB, and it lends it self well to compression, and data does 
> not change that much so incre. backups should be small, my concern is 
> mainly the database(using postgresql) and whether Bacula can handle 
> such retention times of say 3560+ days
> 
> I have seen reten times of one year but that is about it, if anyone 
> have experience of handling longer retention times and care to share 
> their experiences or config files for the jobs, I would be grateful


Hello Mehrdad,

The documentation says nothing about limit regarding retention.
At least I didn't notice such limit.
Retention is specified as a time data type.
For the time data type, the documentation on the page 217 states:

time
   A time or duration specified in seconds. The time is stored internally 
as a 64 bit integer
   value, but it is specified in two parts: a number part and a modifier 
part. The number
   can be an integer or a floating point number. If it is entered in 
floating point notation, it
   will be rounded to the nearest integer. The modifier is mandatory and 
follows the number
   part, either with or without intervening spaces.

This is the relevant document for the version 15.0.x:
https://www.bacula.org/15.0.x-manuals/en/main/main.pdf


However, longer the retention, more data will be kept in the Bacula 
catalog.
If that poses a problem, a solution would be to prune the data from the
catalog and store the volumes (preferably together with the bootstrap
files) and using bscan tool to load the data on the volume back into the
catalog if needed.

It would be a good idea to read this as well:
https://www.bacula.org/15.0.x-manuals/en/main/main.pdf#subsection.22.2.4


Regards

-- 
Josip Deanovic