Hello all

Currently I have bacula backing up the contents of my server on a daily basis (Mon-Fri) on to a tape. There are in total 9 backup tapes so far. One for each day of the week (Mon-Thurs) and one for every Friday in the month (so there are 5 friday tapes). The tapes are all from the same pool and once the tapes are full they should then get recycled.

As I understand and from what I have seen, the data from my server backups up to the tape and is then marked with the append status. Every time that tape is used, data is then appended onto the tape until the tape is full. At this point it is marked as full but wont be recycled until all the tapes from the pool are marked as full (so until all 9 tapes are full).

My question is, is there a way of overwriting the data on the next backup on the tape, rather than appending or requiring that all tapes in a pool are full before a tape can be recycled. As the mon-thurs tapes currently cant be recycled until all the Friday tapes have been used.

Hope im making sense so far.

The reason why I dont have seperate pools for the Friday backups and the other days of the week or even seperate pools for each day of the week, is that if a tape is accidently not changed or someone puts in the incorrect tape by accident a backup will still occur. Which is better than no backup!

Thanks in advance for any help, or suggestions!

t.

If I remember correctly to reuse tapes without appending or waiting for them to be full you can just 'purge' the tape.

Hi jwl17330536 and thanks for your response!

I have adjusted a few parameters in the bacula-dir config files and for the volumes using bconsole. I have set the retention period for the Mon-Thurs tapes as being 1 day and for the friday tapes 28 days (as suggested on another forum). I have also amended the file to ensure that the tapes are only used once (recycle = yes has already been defined).

What I am hoping for is that the Mon-Thurs tapes get marked as full after one use and as the retention period for the friday tapes is set at 28 days it will therefore *hopefully* purge and recycle the correct Mon-thurs tape, rather than waiting for all the friday tapes to be used before recycling the tapes. Hope that makes sense!

If it doesnt work or I find a better solution will update this thread!

t.