Re: Very long retention time

Eric Bollengier via Bacula-users <[email protected]>
Newsgroups gmane.comp.bacula.user
Message-ID <[email protected]>
Hello Guys,

On 8/14/24 20:35, Martin Simmons wrote:
> I have archival backups going back 10 years without any problems.
> 
> If you want to be able to restore any single file from the backup, then you
> need to explicitly configure File Retention and Job Retention in the Client
> resource, because they default to 60 and 180 days respectively.  I've set them
> both to 50 years.
> 
> You also need to set the Volume Retention in the pool (which defaults to 1
> year).
> 
> After changing any of these, update the db and volumes using the bconsole
> update command.

Thanks Martin, these points are essential. When a Volume has no Job Record
associated, it can be purged, and it's not what you are looking for.

In general, I recommend to manage retention only at one place. Bacula
is very flexible, and you have probably 10 different directives to control
the retention in many scenarios.

For example, set Client / File Retention and Job Retention to 50 years
and set the Volume Retention to what you want.

I would never prune Job Records if you can, File records are nice in
general, but you might end up with a very large catalog.

It is possible also to disable Autopruning in different places,
doing so, you control exactly when Bacula will prune records.

Keep us informed, Hope it helps!
Eric

> __Martin
> 
> 
>>>>>> On Wed, 14 Aug 2024 14:21:48 +0200, Mehrdad Ravanbod said:
>>
>> 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
>>
>>
>> Regards /Mehrdad
>>
>> On 2024-08-14 13:36, Gary R. Schmidt wrote:
>>> On 14/08/2024 16:19, Mehrdad Ravanbod wrote:
>>>>
>>>> hello everyone
>>>>
>>>> I need to set up backups for a set of files that need to be saved and
>>>> be possible to access for a very long time(approx. 10 years, for
>>>> compliance reasons), is this possible in Bacula or even advisable??
>>>> Or do we need to solve this some other way
>>>>
>>> The first problem you have is finding media that is guaranteed to last
>>> for 10+ years.
>>>
>>> Tape is generally considered the best for this, but...  YMMV if you
>>> don't store it correctly.
>>>
>>> Another option is long-term optical disk, which is not the same as DVD
>>> or Blu-Ray.
>>>
>>> Talk to the suppliers of archival services in your country for
>>> information on what is available and sensible.
>>>
>>> The second problem is storage for the database.  If you have millions
>>> of files that change frequently you will need a lot of space for the
>>> database.
>>>
>>> Non-Bacula solution: Back when I was at SGI we offered HFS -
>>> Hierarchical File System - for people who had this sort of problem.
>>> And very, very deep pockets.
>>> I don't know if Rackable kept it alive when they purchased SGI, maybe
>>> talk to them?
>>>
>>>      Cheers,
>>>          Gary    B-)
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Bacula-users mailing list
>>> [email protected]
>>> https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bacula-users
>> -- 
>> ________________________________________________________
>> Mehrdad Ravanbod                                        System administrator
>>
>>
>>
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>>
> 
> 
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