[Bacula-users] Autoprune/recycle behavior?

[Robert L. <ro...@le...>]

 Our Daily pool finally filled up after a year of writing to it. Our
changer was asking to label a volume "Daily-xxxx" which all of our tapes
are L3xxxxxx from bar codes. I figured out that this was happening
because of the directive "Label Format" that I had specified. I
commented out the directive and deleted the virtual media entries from
the database and tried the mount command without specify a slot. It
stopped asking for a volume name, but the said there was no appendable
media. I read through the Automatic Volume Recycling chapter
(http://www.bacula.org/en/rel-manual/Automatic_Volume_Recycling.html)
and everything seems to be in place. I've set Autoprune = yes and
Recycle = yes some time ago with a volume retention of 4 months. I've
checked all this in bconsole and everything is correct. 

Now, from the chapter I get from this section:

"By setting AutoPrune to yes you will permit Bacula to automatically
prune all Volumes in the Pool when a Job needs another Volume. Volume
pruning means removing records from the catalog. It does not shrink the
size of the Volume or affect the Volume data until the Volume gets
overwritten. When a Job requests another volume and there are no Volumes
with Volume Status Append available, Bacula will begin volume pruning.
This means that all Jobs that are older than the VolumeRetention period
will be pruned from every Volume that has Volume Status Full or Used and
has Recycle set to yes. Pruning consists of deleting the corresponding
Job, File, and JobMedia records from the catalog database. No change to
the physical data on the Volume occurs during the pruning process. When
all files are pruned from a Volume (i.e. no records in the catalog), the
Volume will be marked as Purged implying that no Jobs remain on the
volume. The Pool records that control the pruning are described below."

This tells me that when there are no appendable volumes, bacula will
search through the pool and prune all jobs and files from all media that
the last written date is greater then the VolumeRetention period. This
also seems to indicate that this pruning overrides any retention period
that may be set in the client directive. However, the behavior that I've
seen tonight seems to indicate that this is not the case. Our client
directive has the file retention period set to 2 years and the job
retention set for 5 years. We have our back-ups in a GFS rotation and
would like our monthly back-ups to archived for this long. Please advise
me how to know exactly what is going on and set this up the way we would
like.

Thank you,

Robert LeBlanc

Life Sciences Computer Support

Brigham Young University