Re: [Bacula-users] Storage Daemon Directives

[Arno L. <al...@it...>]

Hi,

please reply to the list so others can see what we're discussing. 
Also, I prefer to reply to mail sent to me privately if we have a 
consulting contract :-)

15.04.2009 09:05, Hannes Gruber wrote:
> Juche Again!
> 
>> (as we're in dialect here :-)
> Yes we are!
> 
>> Someone correct me if I'm wrong (I have these settings from the start 
>> of all my Bacula installations and never verified what they actually 
>> do ;-)...
>> Label Media: Allows automatic labeling of volumes.
>>
>> Automatic Mount: Allows automatic (i.e., non-manual) mounting of 
>> volumes, for example after a label command.
> OK, nothing special about it, so I will just place it into my
> Filestorage Device.
> 
>> So, my recommendations:
>> - use a separate file system for spool space
>> - limit spool sizes by setting the respective directives
>> - write the log to another file system
>> - monitor spool space availability
>> - manually check for orphaned spool files from time to time
>> (Monitoring and checking can happen automatically if you use a tool 
>> like Nagios.)
> 
> Good Points. So I will leave my Working Dir in /var and put the Spool
> Dir to /home (there is lots of space) and limit it to ???GB.
> How could I find a reasonable size?

By trying :-)

In my opinion, the optimal size would allow all jobs running in 
parallel being spooled completely. As that is not always possible, you 
have to experiment a bit. What you would aim for is to have the tape 
drive running continuously during backups, but to achieve this you 
might need many jobs spooling in parallel, and that plus writing to 
tape continuously might require a *fast* disk system.

The second best thing is to have spool space enough for a complete 
volume plus some spare space, so if, for example, you use tapes with 
20GB native capacity and usually fit 30GB of compressed data onto 
them, 40GB of spool space might be a good compromise.

That said, if you back up to disk, spooling is not really essential. 
It can help to keep jobs from interleaving in the volumes, but you can 
also keep the volume size small and thus reduce the needed spool space.

Arno

> Hannes
> 

-- 
Arno Lehmann
IT-Service Lehmann
Sandstr. 6, 49080 Osnabrück
www.its-lehmann.de