Re: [Bacula-users] needed tapes

[Stefan G. W. <li...@xu...>]

Am 03.03.25 um 17:37 schrieb Rob Gerber:
> Stefan,
> 
> Can you share some details about your current process to predict what 
> media will be needed, including information about your pools and volumes 
> inside them?

Sure.

At first: thanks for offering your help!

-

Basically we run one schedule with jobs using 3 pools.

something for daily runs (mo-fr) -> pool "daily"

weekly runs (saturday 2-4 each month) -> pool "weekly"

monthly runs (1st sat of month) -> pool "monthly"

The monthlies (all FULL) each need 5 or 6 LTO6 tapes, we use an 8-slot 
HPE-loader.

(we also do a quarterly run that is archived, but let's skip that for now)

So basically I look into the "Volumes" part of Bacularis, look for 
status "Append" or "Used", and take the tapes that are already 
overwritable again.

And I look at the tapes in the loader which are full -> take them out

and tapes that are still appendable might stay in a few days more

Something like that.

We would like to have bacula do that selection and mail us a wishlist 
every few days or so.

How do others handle this? Not every site has a tape-library with all 
tapes stored in there, available to the robot (at least the small sites 
...).

> I am not aware of a tool that forecasts what media will be needed by 
> jobs scheduled in the future, but that doesn't mean that such a tool 
> doesn't exist. Hopefully others can contribute here.
> 
> It does occur to me that perhaps we could provide suggestions to 
> automate the creation of a list of media based on the existing process 
> you currently use, via bconsole commands and parsing the output. To do 
> this we would need to better understand your process for selecting media 
> for upcoming jobs.
> 
> I will send some general information about interacting with bconsole 
> from a script, and bacula admin jobs in the next email. If you don't 
> need that information you can ignore that email.

Thanks for that other detailed reply, I will look at it as soon as possible.

greetings, Stefan