Re: [Bacula-users] When are volumes marked "Purged"?

[Martin S. <ma...@li...>]

>>>>> On Tue, 07 Dec 2010 07:53:05 -0500, Rick Koshi said:
> 
> Minor background:
> Bacula 5.0.3, ArchLinux 64-bit, mysql 5.1.  I'm doing my backups to disk,
> and have my filesize limited to 50G.  Earlier, it was set to 5G, and this
> discussion concerns volumes from that earlier setting.
> 
> I have several volumes which were all written by the same full backup job.
> I have manually set the volume retention time to 0 (zero) on those volumes.
> The job that wrote those volumes is no longer in the database, having been
> auto-pruned when last night's backup needed a volume.  The new backup
> automatically started overwriting the old volumes.
> 
> All of this is good so far.
> 
> What's confusing me is that the rest of the volumes are still marked "Full"
> (not "Purged") and are taking up space on the disk.  I was expecting that
> they would be marked "Purged" as soon as their job got pruned, and that
> they would be auto-truncated (since I have "Action On Purge=Truncate" set
> for that pool).
> 
> I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation, but I'm having trouble
> finding it in the manual.  Can anyone explain why it didn't happen the way
> I expect?

It is normal -- the auto-pruning due to Job Retention never marks volumes as
purged.  This preserves their contents until the last possible moment.

The only operations that mark volumes as purged are the purge command and the
volume recycling code.  The latter happens when Bacula needs a new volume (as
you noticed) and it stops looks when it finds a volume that can be purged and
recycled.

__Martin