Hi,
Sorry to bother everyone with basic questions, but I looked in the list
archive and couldn't find answers to these.
I've got Bacula running at home on Ubuntu Linux, backing up itself, a Fedora
Core 5 box, and a Windows XP machine, all to files (It's on Ubuntu because I
had trouble fighting HAL on FC5 to get the rights to the disk!). It's working
now, but I have a couple of questions.
Using software compression doesn't seem to be working on the Linux boxes. I
didn't realize it needed the gzip dev libraries at first, but now I've
installed them (If they weren't there it would have been nice to have an error
message). Is there a way to confirm it's now functioning? the backup takes well
over 24hours on the first run, so the report takes a long time coming!
Similarly, at first I thought the compression wasn't working on Windows, but
thanks to the end-of-job report I now know it is. You just don't get a lot of
compression when the disk is already compressed! The status display shows bytes
transmitted, but it could be useful if it showed raw data volume too if
different :)
Since I didn't compile the Ubuntu package myself, is there a way to find what
options were used when it was compiled? otherwise I'll go back to source and
recompile it to be certain what's there.
The reload option is very useful for the bacula-dir program. Is there a
similar option for the fd or sd programs? or a way to restart them without
interrupting current jobs?
I haven't found anything in the documentation, but can the fstype option
manage ntfs partitions? I see Bacula can save a partition as raw data, but
that's less efficient than just saving the data (certainly for recovers!).
Partimage can save it in a much smaller space, but of course it's an extra file
to be backed up on the Linux system..
At work I use Tivoli TSM, and that system only ever runs incremental backups
after the initial full one. It does this by watching tapes, and when there are
enough expired files on a tape it consolidates the live files onto available
tapes, and makes the cleared ones available for re-use. Although it needs a
serious tape library to do that properly, it ought to be fairly easy to do
something similar with a file-based system. Failing that, a utility to erase
expired files from within old volumes, and shrink them down could be _very_
useful!
A point of confusion happened when I tried testing a restore on the Windows
box. After the system has returned and showed the root directory '/' while 'ls'
returned 'C:/', my brain flipped into Win mode, and I tried 'C:' and 'cd /' to
start climbing the tree. It wasn't till I was looking for problems that I
realised I should have used 'cd C:/' to start. Maybe a clarification in the
documentation would be useful?
Thanks for all the work you've done on this system, and for making it
available anyway!
Jim Deakin
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