I’ve been using bacula for a couple of months now in conjunction with puppet to make automated backups of all servers that are managed by puppet. My bacula setup labels a volume for every job it runs with a unique name:

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Label Format = "${Job}.${Year}${Month:p/2/0/r}${Day:p/2/0/r}.${Hour:p/2/0/r}${Minute:p/2/0/r}"

These volumes are automatically purged once the retention of all files contained on the volume expires (which is configured per-pool). Due to the unique names however, the volumes cannot be recycled. The result of this is that the volumes that have been marked as purged in the catalog remain as-is on the disk. After some time this ultimately resulted in a full disk, thus halting all backups performed on that pool. Not good. Not good at all.

I thought volumes would be truncated at the time they are marked as purged, but I probably made some configuration error somewhere along the road or I don’t quite understand how the truncating process works, because all of my purged disks are using their original disk space.

Because I’m pressed for time and can’t be bothered with old backups anyway, I’ve decided to just delete all purged volumes (which were beyond their retention date anyway). Perhaps the steps I took to delete these volumes can help others (Or others can recommend me a better way to deal with old volumes), so here goes:

Pruning all clients

Before you start cleaning old volumes, it might be wise to ensure that all volumes are pruned before cleaning, so you maximize the number of volumes you are going to delete.

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#!/bin/bash
clients=`mysql -e'select Name from Client ORDER BY Name ASC;' bacula | tail -n+2`
	
for client in `echo $clients`
do
  echo "prune files client=${client} yes" | bconsole
done

Checking the number of volumes to be purged

Using list volumes in bconsole you can check the status of all volumes known to bacula. I’m merely interested in the number of volumes that are currently marked as purged:

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echo "list volumes" | bconsole | grep "Purged" | awk {'print $4'} | wc -l

This resulted in a list of thousands of volumes. (We’re running, full, incremental and diff backups, so the numbers stack up). Time to get rid of them.

Removing purged volumes from the catalog and deleting them

Using this script I’ve removed all purged volumes from the catalog, after which they were physically deleted from the disk, freeing up precious space for more recent backups.

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#!/bin/bash
for f in `echo "list volume" | bconsole | grep Purged | cut -d ' ' -f6`; do 
	echo "delete volume=$f yes" | bconsole;
	rm -rf /mnt/bacula/default/$f;
done

Removing volumes that are missing from the catalog

Somehow I also ended up with some volumes on the disk that were not present in the bacula catalog at all. In my opinion these could be cleaned up as well, hence:

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#!/bin/bash

cd /mnt/bacula/default
for i in `find . -maxdepth 1 -type f -printf "%f\n"`; do
  echo "list volume=$i" | bconsole | if grep --quiet "No results to list"; then
        echo "$i is ready to be deleted"
        rm -f /mnt/bacula/default/$i
  fi
done

Finishing up

To prevent full disks these tasks should be scheduled using cron and run daily (or at least weekly) to keep your disks and catalog lean & clean.