Possible to set up multiple independent backup drives?

[Leonhart231]

Hi all! I tried getting this to work the last time I set up Bareos but failed, so figured I'd get some help to see if it's even possible since I want to dive in again.

My network setup is basically a home server that will act as the director, storage daemon, and also a client. There will be a few other clients on the local network, and a couple remote clients.

In terms of the backup drive setup, I have two hard drives that I can connect to the server, and at most one is connected at any time, the other is stashed off-site at someone else's house completely disconnected. What I have implemented now (using rdiff-backup) that I want to see if it's possible to emulate with Bareos is that each drive is completely independent from the other. Meaning whenever I do a backup, only the data on the drive currently connected is accounted for. So if I swap my on and off site drives, the newly on-site drive has a backup done accounting for the fact that there have been no backups done on that drive in the last month (or however long it's been). The intent with this is that if my house burns down, I will always have a fairly recent full set of files available to restore through the drive that's currently off-site. It'll be missing some history, and there will be "gaps" in the history whenever it's off-site, but this is acceptable to me. It is not possible to have both drives connected at the same time and rsync / run a copy job, or rather, I really want to avoid that being required.

Each drive has more than enough space for a full copy of all clients' data plus many incremental backups, and my plan is to do an "Always incremental Backup Scheme", just in case that's important. I toyed with the idea of moving the database itself to the backup drive, but I have other Postgres DBs already, so it doesn't look like that's possible, plus it felt like a hack.

Manually running a full backup after swapping drives is an option, but not great since it's manual and takes storage space that feels unnecessary. I assume it'd work with an Always Incremental scheme if push came to shove though.

Is this possible in Bareos? Or given the description above, is there some other way I should be doing this setup that is "more correct"? Thanks for any help, and happy holidays!

- Leon

[Erich Eckner]

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Hi,

not thinking this fully through, it sounds, like you could get, what you
aim for, if you set up two independent allways-incremental backups - one
for each external disk - and accept, that one of both (the remote one) is
always failing - until you switch disks.

HTH, Erich

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[Leonhart231]

Hi Erich,

Ah, thank you! That got me on the right track and I was able to find the right line in the manual about it. For anyone else stumbling on this in the future, the Job Resource part of the manual states in a warning that along with duplicating the Job definitions, "As a matter of fact, if you want separate backups, you have to duplicate your filesets with a different name and the same content.". So it's just a matter of duplicating the FileSet too, otherwise both the Client and FileSet match and Bareos will consider them to be "the same backup", even if you duplicate the Job.

Thanks,

Leon