Rule

I'm trying to get Bacula to make a separate copy of monthly full backups that can be kept off-site. To do this, I'm experimenting with its "Copy" directive. I was hoping to get a complete set of tapes ready to keep offsite before I left, but it was taking much longer than anticipated (2 days to copy 2 tapes). So I cancelled the jobs, typed unmount at bconsole, and went home thinking Bacula would just grab the right tape from the autochanger when backups came.

What I should have typed was release. release lets Bacula grab whatever tape it needs. unmount leaves Bacula unwilling to do anything on its own, and it waits for the operator (ie, me) to do something.

Result: 3 weeks of no backups. Welcome back, chump.

There are a number of things I can do to make sure this doesn't happen again. There's a thread on the Bacula-users mailing list (came up in my absence, even) detailing how to make sure something's mounted. I can use release the way Kern intended. I can set up a separate check that goes to my cel phone directly, and not through Nagios. I can run a small backup job manually on Fridays just to make sure it's going to work. And on it goes.

I knew enough not to make changes as root on Friday before going on vacation. But now I know that includes backups.