Bacula is a great tool when you want disk backup software and have large storage systems available. Because of its modular structure Bacula can be operated across different data centers, where you will have several Storage Daemons on each site to distribute the load of writing your files into backup volumes.
Bacula Volumes on Disk
In the case of disk backup Bacula will create files on your storage devices that are called volumes. All the backup data will go into those files. Only when you make use of our new cloud backup tool a volume will be subdivided into “Parts”. The size and number of volumes can be configured with Bacula disk backup solution settings. You are not bound to any fixed sizes as you are with tapes.
Pools and Retention
Bacula Volumes can be grouped into pools. You can specify which jobs should write into which pool. Volumes will inherit the Retention Time from the pool setting, and you can also have pools where the backup data is encrypted. Everything can be configured in a very granular manner. Bacula allows you to copy or migrate data from one pool into another with Copy Jobs and Migration Jobs. This way you can store your data redundantly on disks in several geolocations. You can even build an archive with Bacula by configuring a pool with a very long retention time and a manual schedule.
Backup to disk
When thousands of clients are involved, you will soon experience that the disk subsystems needed for disk backup will become quite large. In particular, you may want to keep more than one Full backup and many Incremental backups in retention which will enable you to go back further in time for your restores. A good controller, sufficient RAID levels, flexible partition layout and a well performing filesystem are a must. Bacula works with a huge variety of filesystems, which will make your disk backups fast, successful and of course very reliable.
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