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I have just started using Bacula and it is great, one tutorial I read recommended putting full backups in a different pool (disk) to incremental backups.

What would the benefit of sperating full and incremental backups like this be?

What pool would Bacula right to if it was using the incremental schedule (and incremental pool) but upgraded the backup to full as it couldnt find the previous full backup?

morleyc
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In the tape world this is often done so you can easily grab your full backups and ship them off-site/archive them/etc.

If you are backing up to disk this is probably less of an issue for you, unless you are using a removable disk and want to be able to take the entire "full backups" drive off-site.

Re: pool selection, I believe Bacula uses the running job level to select the pool (so an incremental that got upgraded to a full would go in the full backups pool). I've not tested that though, so verify my assumption before relying on it in production, and if I'm wrong tell me :)

voretaq7
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    Yes, it does use the job level to select the pool – sendmoreinfo Jan 22 '13 at 20:40
  • @sendmoreinfo to clarify - it uses the running job level? (i.e. an incremental upgraded to a full is considered "full" for purposes of pool selection) - I've never actually run across this situation on my systems so I'm curious too. I could just look at the code, but I'm ***SO*** lazy :) – voretaq7 Jan 22 '13 at 21:08
  • Yeah, that's it. IIRC there was a bug that if different pools used different storages, job level upgrade didn't switch to relevant storage too, but like you, I'm too lazy to check Mantis now :) – sendmoreinfo Jan 22 '13 at 21:10
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    Here are some more arguments: different pools allow you to specify different retention periods for your volumes as well as the maximum file size for each volume of the desired backup type. This allows you to implement more space-efficient backup plans. Size limit is very useful for remote file systems because bacula will need to read the whole file from the start. – jollyroger Jun 13 '13 at 10:05