Re: [Bacula-users] Count Based Retention

[John Y. <ya...@fl...>]

On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 11:03:07AM -0400, Dan Langille wrote:
> John Yates wrote:
>> Is there any way to get Bacula to expire backup jobs based on a count
>> of existing jobs of the same type rather than by how old each job of a
>> type is?  I am currently running a job every night that backs up to
>> disk, and I want to keep the two most recent ones.  If it set the
>> retention period to two days, that should ususall do the right thing,
>> but if, for example, I shut off all my computers and go on vacation
>> for a week, when I come back, my backups will all be expired -- not
>> what I want.
>
> I hope this is an example.  A retention period of two days isn't want  
> you want.  If you lose a file on Monday and do not notice it until  
> Friday, you are out of luck.
>
> I know of no way to explicitly do this.  Retention periods are periods  
> of time, not counts.
>
> NOTE: Your backups will still be there, on the Volume.
>
> You may want to try "Purge Oldest Volume" which will ignore any  
> retention periods, then just set your retention period to be 1 year. Fix 
> the number of Volumes in the Pool to be three (that way you always have 
> two backups, which writing your third backup).
>
>> I suspect that what many, if not most, people really want is to keep a
>> specific number of old backups, not any that are more recent than a
>> certain date.  Is there some way to make bacula work this way?  The
>> Storix backup product that I have used can do this.
>
> If someone really wants that, they'll code it.  :)
>

This is not an example, but I'm going to migrate the disk backups to
tape.  I am working with limited disk space and a tape drive that has
too little capacity for the amount of data I need to back up.