[Bacula-users] auto cleaning / cleaning tape configuration

[Ralf G. <Ral...@ra...>]

Hi,

our NEC T40A changer (LTO3 drive) supports two cleaning modes.

<manual>
Clean the library about once a month

Auto Cleaning
Caution:
Make sure that the backup software supports the Auto Cleaning feature. If
not, the backup software cannot recognize the library unit under automatic
cleaning, and it may cause a trouble. In automatic cleaning mode, the
library automatically performs cleaning to the drive to which a cleaning
is requested.

Cleaning by Panel Operation
[...]
</manual>

The bacula (1.39.28) doc mentions that auto cleaning is not supportet yet.

But there is an example on how to define a cleaning tape in a pool.

Pool {
  Name ...
  Cleaning Prefix = "CLN"
}

Some questions:

* if auto cleaning is not supportet by bacula, should I disable this
changer option? I guess the answer is yes.

* I use several pools and have one cleaning tape assigend to slot 32
(default cleaning tape slot of this changer). Thus I would simply create a
new pool for this tape? All tape have barcodes and the cleaning tape
barcode starts with CLN (suprise, suprise ;)

* in the archives I found references that one has to create an admin job
to perform periodical cleaning of the drive. Is this a regular backup job
that just uses the cleaning tape? But that wouldn't make make sense to me
because data has to be transfered for this. I'm sure I'm missing something
here.

Ralf