Dedicated Restore Drive

When you set up your storage and drive, it can be useful to have a dedicated drive for restoration purpose as devices in Bacula cannot backup and restore at the same time. This applies to all device types. With virtual Autochangers (aka disk changers), you can create as many devices as you want, thus having dedicated ones fore restores plus a few spare ones is a good practice.

In order to have a dedicated device, you just need to add the Directive Autoselect = no to a device definition in your Storage Daemon configuration.

An example device dedicated for a restore:

Device {
   Name = RestoreDrive
   Media Type = File
   Archive Device = /pool/Backup_storage
   LabelMedia = yes
   Random Access = Yes
   AutomaticMount = yes
   RemovableMedia = no
   AlwaysOpen = no
   Autoselect = no     # this drive will not be selected for a backup
}

Note

In the case of a Tape Library, you can dedicate a tape drive or adjust Maximum Concurrent Job values in order to have one free “most of the time”. Your restore Job will then be processed once a drive is free. Priorities can be used to ensure restore jobs run as soon as possible, and backup jobs can be stopped or cancelled to free up drives.