Avoiding new Fulls with broken incremental chain

[Brock Palen]

I am trying to understand more how Bareos works internally. One question is how does it handle if you get a hole in your backup history?

Say we have a very large backup 100TB, with only modest changes, but doing a new full out of cycle might be time/load/media capacity prohibitive.

Now lets say we have a chain of 20 incrementals,

Now lets say disaster strikes. Drive eats the tape with incrementals 5, 7, and 10.
You purge that volume because the data is now not recoverable and you have holes in your backup history.

On the next backup it looks like by default Bareos will NOT detect there are files on the client not in the catalog if they were last updated before the most recent backup (Incremental 20).

So questions,

1. Verify that is correct understanding
2. Does adding accurate = yes capture those files getting them in the next backup?
3. Does DiskToCatalog Verify job detect that there are missing files in the catalog?

Or is the only fix to run a new full backup?


Brock Palen
bro...@mlds-networks.com
www.mlds-networks.com
Websites, Linux, Hosting, Joomla, Consulting

[Andreas Rogge]

Am 13.05.26 um 19:22 schrieb 'Brock Palen' via bareos-users:

> Now lets say disaster strikes. Drive eats the tape with incrementals 5, 7, and 10.
> You purge that volume because the data is now not recoverable and you have holes in your backup history.

I'd rather delete these volumes, because the physical tapes are gone.
Nevertheless, pruning the associated jobs (both "prune volume" and
"delete volume" imply that) is the right thing to do.

> On the next backup it looks like by default Bareos will NOT detect there are files on the client not in the catalog if they were last updated before the most recent backup (Incremental 20).

If you have accurate disabled that is true. I very much hope you have
accurate mode enabled so these files will be picked up.
If you don't have accurate enabled yet, you can just enable it on an
existing set of jobs and it will just start to work.

> So questions,
> 1. Verify that is correct understanding

Sounds right, yes.

> 2. Does adding accurate = yes capture those files getting them in the next backup?

It will (besides other things) make the agent backup all files that are
not in the catalog yet, no matter how old these are.

> 3. Does DiskToCatalog Verify job detect that there are missing files in the catalog?

I think this should be detected, but I never tried it myself.

Best Regards,
Andreas
--
Andreas Rogge andrea...@bareos.com
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[Brock Palen]

Excelent, yes we use Accurate and we did some testing and it does appear the verify does pick them up also,

Brock Palen
bro...@mlds-networks.com
www.mlds-networks.com
Websites, Linux, Hosting, Joomla, Consulting

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