Re: "No files" in Bacularis for Jobs

Bill Arlofski via Bacula-users <[email protected]> Mon, 23 Jun 2025 16:47:27 +0000
Newsgroups	gmane.comp.bacula.user
Message-ID	<[email protected]>
On 6/23/25 10:11 AM, Stefan G. Weichinger via Bacula-users wrote:
> 
> greetings
> 
> today a customer asks me for a list of files in a directory at a given
> date in february
> 
> I open Bacularis-5.0.0, and want to use "Restore" to browse the database:
> 
> there's a job backing up the samba-share containing the relevant
> directories.
> 
> What scares me:
> 
> I choose a FULL backup but when I come to "Step 3 - select files to
> restore", it tells me:
> 
> "It seems that there is no files for choosing or file records in
> database for this job has been purged (file retention period expired)"
> 
> So the Job is in the DB but "without content" ?
> 
> I assume the files are on tape anyway ... right now the tapes are
> off-site so I can't try ... but I assume I could run some full restore
> and search my files in there?
> 
> -
> 
> Would the catalog contain that information?
> 
> I backup the catalog also even that someone told me here it wouldn't be
> nec
essary anymore ...
> 
> I have a catalog backup from early march ...
> 
> thanks for any pointers here.
> 
> Seems I have to review my setup ...

Hello Stefan,

This is not a Bacularis issue, and it is a Bacula issue only in the sense that Bacula is doing what it has been 
told/configured to do. :)

You will need to review your File, Job, and Volume retention periods to prevent this in the future.

What seems to have happened is that Bacula has pruned the File records for this Job from the catalog, but the Job record 
still exists.

Typically, in (very) large environments we see people setting the file records to be pruned sooner than the job and volume 
records. This is to keep the Bacula catalog DB size under control. The file table takes up the most space, so people make the 
decision to configure File retention periods to be smaller than the Job retention periods so that they can go back and 
restore specific Files for some period of time, and when that passes,
 they can still go back and restore the Job(s), but they 
know and accept that they will not be able to choose specific files from the job to restore.

If it is critical in this case that you are able to choose specific files/directories to restore, you can take a look at the 
job log and identify the volumes it used. Then you can use `bscan` to scan each of these volumes - in the correct order - and 
re-insert the file records back in to the database. There are more things to consider here, but this is an option.

You current choice is to just restore the entire job, and then do the inspection of the files/directories once the restore is 
complete.

I know this is probably not the answer you wanted to hear. :-|

If your environment is not very large (think million/billions of files), then typically we recommend to set the File and Job 
retention periods to be the same so that if the Job is in the catalog, then you know that you will be able to select specific 
files from
 that job.


Best regards,
Bill

-- 
Bill Arlofski
[email protected]

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