+
+
+Item 27: Archival (removal) of User Files to Tape
+ Date: Nov. 24/2005
+ Origin: Ray Pengelly [ray at biomed dot queensu dot ca
+ Status:
+
+ What: The ability to archive data to storage based on certain parameters
+ such as age, size, or location. Once the data has been written to
+ storage and logged it is then pruned from the originating
+ filesystem. Note! We are talking about user's files and not
+ Bacula Volumes.
+
+ Why: This would allow fully automatic storage management which becomes
+ useful for large datastores. It would also allow for auto-staging
+ from one media type to another.
+
+ Example 1) Medical imaging needs to store large amounts of data.
+ They decide to keep data on their servers for 6 months and then put
+ it away for long term storage. The server then finds all files
+ older than 6 months writes them to tape. The files are then removed
+ from the server.
+
+ Example 2) All data that hasn't been accessed in 2 months could be
+ moved from high-cost, fibre-channel disk storage to a low-cost
+ large-capacity SATA disk storage pool which doesn't have as quick of
+ access time. Then after another 6 months (or possibly as one
+ storage pool gets full) data is migrated to Tape.
+
+Item 28: Ability to reconnect a disconnected comm line
+ Date: 26 April 2009
+ Origin: Kern/Eric
+ Status:
+
+ What: Often jobs fail because of a communications line drop. In that
+ case, Bacula should be able to reconnect to the other daemon and
+ resume the job.
+
+ Why: Avoids backuping data already saved.
+
+ Notes: *Very* complicated from a design point of view because of authenication.
+
+Item 29: Multiple threads in file daemon for the same job
+ Date: 27 November 2005
+ Origin: Ove Risberg (Ove.Risberg at octocode dot com)
+ Status:
+
+ What: I want the file daemon to start multiple threads for a backup
+ job so the fastest possible backup can be made.
+
+ The file daemon could parse the FileSet information and start
+ one thread for each File entry located on a separate
+ filesystem.
+
+ A confiuration option in the job section should be used to
+ enable or disable this feature. The confgutration option could
+ specify the maximum number of threads in the file daemon.
+
+ If the theads could spool the data to separate spool files
+ the restore process will not be much slower.
+
+ Why: Multiple concurrent backups of a large fileserver with many
+ disks and controllers will be much faster.
+
+ Notes: (KES) This is not necessary and could be accomplished
+ by having two jobs. In addition, the current VSS code
+ is single thread.
+
+
+Item 30: Automatic disabling of devices
+ Date: 2005-11-11
+ Origin: Peter Eriksson <peter at ifm.liu dot se>
+ Status:
+
+ What: After a configurable amount of fatal errors with a tape drive
+ Bacula should automatically disable further use of a certain
+ tape drive. There should also be "disable"/"enable" commands in
+ the "bconsole" tool.
+
+ Why: On a multi-drive jukebox there is a possibility of tape drives
+ going bad during large backups (needing a cleaning tape run,
+ tapes getting stuck). It would be advantageous if Bacula would
+ automatically disable further use of a problematic tape drive
+ after a configurable amount of errors has occurred.
+
+ An example: I have a multi-drive jukebox (6 drives, 380+ slots)
+ where tapes occasionally get stuck inside the drive. Bacula will
+ notice that the "mtx-changer" command will fail and then fail
+ any backup jobs trying to use that drive. However, it will still
+ keep on trying to run new jobs using that drive and fail -
+ forever, and thus failing lots and lots of jobs... Since we have
+ many drives Bacula could have just automatically disabled
+ further use of that drive and used one of the other ones
+ instead.
+
+
+Item 31: Enable persistent naming/number of SQL queries
+ Date: 24 Jan, 2007
+ Origin: Mark Bergman
+ Status:
+
+ What:
+ Change the parsing of the query.sql file and the query command so that
+ queries are named/numbered by a fixed value, not their order in the
+ file.
+
+
+ Why:
+ One of the real strengths of bacula is the ability to query the
+ database, and the fact that complex queries can be saved and
+ referenced from a file is very powerful. However, the choice
+ of query (both for interactive use, and by scripting input
+ to the bconsole command) is completely dependent on the order
+ within the query.sql file. The descriptve labels are helpful for
+ interactive use, but users become used to calling a particular
+ query "by number", or may use scripts to execute queries. This
+ presents a problem if the number or order of queries in the file
+ changes.
+
+ If the query.sql file used the numeric tags as a real value (rather
+ than a comment), then users could have a higher confidence that they
+ are executing the intended query, that their local changes wouldn't
+ conflict with future bacula upgrades.
+
+ For scripting, it's very important that the intended query is
+ what's actually executed. The current method of parsing the
+ query.sql file discourages scripting because the addition or
+ deletion of queries within the file will require corresponding
+ changes to scripts. It may not be obvious to users that deleting
+ query "17" in the query.sql file will require changing all
+ references to higher numbered queries. Similarly, when new
+ bacula distributions change the number of "official" queries,
+ user-developed queries cannot simply be appended to the file
+ without also changing any references to those queries in scripts
+ or procedural documentation, etc.
+
+ In addition, using fixed numbers for queries would encourage more
+ user-initiated development of queries, by supporting conventions
+ such as:
+
+ queries numbered 1-50 are supported/developed/distributed by
+ with official bacula releases
+
+ queries numbered 100-200 are community contributed, and are
+ related to media management
+
+ queries numbered 201-300 are community contributed, and are
+ related to checksums, finding duplicated files across
+ different backups, etc.
+
+ queries numbered 301-400 are community contributed, and are
+ related to backup statistics (average file size, size per
+ client per backup level, time for all clients by backup level,
+ storage capacity by media type, etc.)
+
+ queries numbered 500-999 are locally created
+
+ Notes:
+ Alternatively, queries could be called by keyword (tag), rather
+ than by number.
+
+
+Item 32: Bacula Dir, FD and SD to support proxies
+Origin: Karl Grindley @ MIT Lincoln Laboratory <kgrindley at ll dot mit dot edu>
+Date: 25 March 2009
+Status: proposed
+
+What: Support alternate methods for nailing up a TCP session such
+ as SOCKS5, SOCKS4 and HTTP (CONNECT) proxies. Such a feature
+ would allow tunneling of bacula traffic in and out of proxied
+ networks.
+
+Why: Currently, bacula is architected to only function on a flat network, with
+ no barriers or limitations. Due to the large configuration states of
+ any network and the infinite configuration where file daemons and
+ storage daemons may sit in relation to one another, bacula often is
+ not usable on a network where filtered or air-gaped networks exist.
+ While often solutions such as ACL modifications to firewalls or port
+ redirection via SNAT or DNAT will solve the issue, often however,
+ these solutions are not adequate or not allowed by hard policy.
+
+ In an air-gapped network with only a highly locked down proxy services
+ are provided (SOCKS4/5 and/or HTTP and/or SSH outbound) ACLs or
+ iptable rules will not work.
+
+Notes: Director resource tunneling: This configuration option to utilize a
+ proxy to connect to a client should be specified in the client
+ resource Client resource tunneling: should be configured in the client
+ resource in the director config file? Or configured on the bacula-fd
+ configuration file on the fd host itself? If the ladder, this would
+ allow only certain clients to use a proxy, where others do not when
+ establishing the TCP connection to the storage server.
+
+ Also worth noting, there are other 3rd party, light weight apps that
+ could be utilized to bootstrap this. Instead of sockifing bacula
+ itself, use an external program to broker proxy authentication, and
+ connection to the remote host. OpenSSH does this by using the
+ "ProxyCommand" syntax in the client configuration and uses stdin and
+ stdout to the command. Connect.c is a very popular one.
+ (http://bent.latency.net/bent/darcs/goto-san-connect-1.85/src/connect.html).
+ One could also possibly use stunnel, netcat, etc.
+
+
+Item 33: Add Minumum Spool Size directive
+Date: 20 March 2008
+Origin: Frank Sweetser <fs@wpi.edu>
+
+ What: Add a new SD directive, "minimum spool size" (or similar). This
+ directive would specify a minimum level of free space available for
+ spooling. If the unused spool space is less than this level, any
+ new spooling requests would be blocked as if the "maximum spool
+ size" threshold had bee reached. Already spooling jobs would be
+ unaffected by this directive.
+
+ Why: I've been bitten by this scenario a couple of times:
+
+ Assume a maximum spool size of 100M. Two concurrent jobs, A and B,
+ are both running. Due to timing quirks and previously running jobs,
+ job A has used 99.9M of space in the spool directory. While A is
+ busy despooling to disk, B is happily using the remaining 0.1M of
+ spool space. This ends up in a spool/despool sequence every 0.1M of
+ data. In addition to fragmenting the data on the volume far more
+ than was necessary, in larger data sets (ie, tens or hundreds of
+ gigabytes) it can easily produce multi-megabyte report emails!
+
+
+
+
+
+Item 34: Command that releases all drives in an autochanger
+ Origin: Blake Dunlap (blake@nxs.net)
+ Date: 10/07/2009
+ Status: Request
+
+ What: It would be nice if there was a release command that
+ would release all drives in an autochanger instead of having to
+ do each one in turn.
+
+ Why: It can take some time for a release to occur, and the
+ commands must be given for each drive in turn, which can quicky
+ scale if there are several drives in the library. (Having to
+ watch the console, to give each command can waste a good bit of
+ time when you start getting into the 16 drive range when the
+ tapes can take up to 3 minutes to eject each)
+
+ Notes: Due to the way some autochangers/libraries work, you
+ cannot assume that new tapes inserted will go into slots that are
+ not currently believed to be in use by bacula (the tape from that
+ slot is in a drive). This would make any changes in
+ configuration quicker/easier, as all drives need to be released
+ before any modifications to slots.
+
+Item 35: Run bscan on a remote storage daemon from within bconsole.
+ Date: 07 October 2009
+ Origin: Graham Keeling <graham@equiinet.com>
+ Status: Proposing
+
+ What: The ability to be able to run bscan on a remote storage daemon from
+ within bconsole in order to populate your catalog.
+
+ Why: Currently, it seems you have to:
+ a) log in to a console on the remote machine
+ b) figure out where the storage daemon config file is
+ c) figure out the storage device from the config file
+ d) figure out the catalog IP address
+ e) figure out the catalog port
+ f) open the port on the catalog firewall
+ g) configure the catalog database to accept connections from the
+ remote host
+ h) build a 'bscan' command from (b)-(e) above and run it
+ It would be much nicer to be able to type something like this into
+ bconsole:
+ *bscan storage=<storage> device=<device> volume=<volume>
+ or something like:
+ *bscan storage=<storage> all
+ It seems to me that the scan could also do a better job than the
+ external bscan program currently does. It would possibly be able to
+ deduce some extra details, such as the catalog StorageId for the
+ volumes.
+
+ Notes: (Kern). If you need to do a bscan, you have done something wrong,
+ so this functionality should not need to be integrated into the
+ the Storage daemon. However, I am not opposed to someone implementing
+ this feature providing that all the code is in a shared object (or dll)
+ and does not add significantly to the size of the Storage daemon. In
+ addition, the code should be written in a way such that the same source
+ code is used in both the bscan program and the Storage daemon to avoid
+ adding a lot of new code that must be maintained by the project.
+
+Item 36: Implement a Migration job type that will create a reverse
+ incremental (or decremental) backup from two existing full backups.
+ Date: 05 October 2009
+ Origin: Griffith College Dublin. Some sponsorship available.
+ Contact: Gavin McCullagh <gavin.mccullagh@gcd.ie>
+ Status:
+
+ What: The ability to take two full backup jobs and derive a reverse
+ incremental backup from them. The older full backup data may then
+ be discarded.
+
+ Why: Long-term backups based on keeping full backups can be expensive in
+ media. In many cases (eg a NAS), as the client accumulates files
+ over months and years, the same file will be duplicated unchanged,
+ across many media and datasets. Eg, Less than 10% (and
+ shrinking) of our monthly full mail server backup is new files,
+ the other 90% is also in the previous full backup.
+ Regularly converting the oldest full backup into a reverse
+ incremental backup allows the admin to keep access to old backup
+ jobs, but remove all of the duplicated files, freeing up media.
+
+ Notes: This feature was previously discussed on the bacula-devel list
+ here: http://www.mail-archive.com/bacula-devel@lists.sourceforge.net/msg04962.html
+
+Item 37: Separate "Storage" and "Device" in the bacula-dir.conf
+ Date: 29 April 2009
+ Origin: "James Harper" <james.harper@bendigoit.com.au>
+ Status: not implemented or documented
+
+ What: Separate "Storage" and "Device" in the bacula-dir.conf
+ The resulting config would looks something like:
+
+ Storage {
+ Name = name_of_server
+ Address = hostname/IP address
+ SDPort = 9103
+ Password = shh_its_a_secret
+ Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 7
+ }
+
+ Device {
+ Name = name_of_device
+ Storage = name_of_server
+ Device = name_of_device_on_sd
+ Media Type = media_type
+ Maximum Concurrent Jobs = 1
+ }
+
+ Maximum Concurrent Jobs would be specified with a server and a device
+ maximum, which would both be honoured by the director. Almost everything
+ that mentions a 'Storage' would need to be changed to 'Device', although
+ perhaps a 'Storage' would just be a synonym for 'Device' for backwards
+ compatibility...
+
+ Why: If you have multiple Storage definitions pointing to different
+ Devices in the same Storage daemon, the "status storage" command
+ prompts for each different device, but they all give the same
+ information.
+
+ Notes:
+
+Item 38: Least recently used device selection for tape drives in autochanger.
+Date: 12 October 2009
+Origin: Thomas Carter <tcarter@memc.com>
+Status: Proposal
+
+What: A better tape drive selection algorithm for multi-drive
+ autochangers. The AUTOCHANGER class contains an array list of tape
+ devices. When a tape drive is needed, this list is always searched in
+ order. This causes lower number drives (specifically drive 0) to do a
+ majority of the work with higher numbered drives possibly never being
+ used. When a drive in an autochanger is reserved for use, its entry should
+ be moved to the end of the list; this would give a rough LRU drive
+ selection.
+
+Why: The current implementation places a majority of use and wear on drive
+ 0 of a multi-drive autochanger.
+
+Notes:
+
+Item 39: Implement a Storage device like Amazon's S3.
+ Date: 25 August 2008
+ Origin: Soren Hansen <soren@ubuntu.com>
+ Status: Not started.
+ What: Enable the storage daemon to store backup data on Amazon's
+ S3 service.
+
+ Why: Amazon's S3 is a cheap way to store data off-site.
+
+ Notes: If we configure the Pool to put only one job per volume (they don't
+ support append operation), and the volume size isn't to big (100MB?),
+ it should be easy to adapt the disk-changer script to add get/put
+ procedure with curl. So, the data would be safetly copied during the
+ Job.
+
+ Cloud should be only used with Copy jobs, users should always have
+ a copy of their data on their site.
+
+ We should also think to have our own cache, trying always to have
+ cloud volume on the local disk. (I don't know if users want to store
+ 100GB on cloud, so it shouldn't be a disk size problem). For example,
+ if bacula want to recycle a volume, it will start by downloading the
+ file to truncate it few seconds later, if we can avoid that...
+
+Item 40: Convert tray monitor on Windows to a stand alone program
+ Date: 26 April 2009
+ Origin: Kern/Eric
+ Status:
+
+ What: Separate Win32 tray monitor to be a separate program.
+
+ Why: Vista does not allow SYSTEM services to interact with the
+ desktop, so the current tray monitor does not work on Vista
+ machines.
+
+ Notes: Requires communicating with the FD via the network (simulate
+ a console connection).
+
+Item 41: Improve Bacula's tape and drive usage and cleaning management
+ Date: 8 November 2005, November 11, 2005
+ Origin: Adam Thornton <athornton at sinenomine dot net>,
+ Arno Lehmann <al at its-lehmann dot de>
+ Status:
+
+ What:
+ 1. Measure tape and drive usage (mostly implemented)
+ 2. Retiring a volume when too old or too many errors
+ 3. Handle cleaning and tape alerts.
+
+ Why: Needed
+
+
+Item 42: Relabel disk volume after recycling
+ Origin: Pasi Kärkkäinen <pasik@iki.fi>
+ Date: 07 May 2009.
+ Status: Not implemented yet, no code written.
+
+ What: The ability to relabel the disk volume (and thus rename the file on the
+ disk) after it has been recycled. Useful when you have a single job
+ per disk volume, and you use a custom Label format, for example:
+ Label Format =
+ "${Client}-${Level}-${NumVols:p/4/0/r}-${Year}_${Month}_${Day}-${Hour}_${Minute}"
+
+ Why: Disk volumes in Bacula get the label/filename when they are used for the
+ first time. If you use recycling and custom label format like above,
+ the disk volume name doesn't match the contents after it has been
+ recycled. This feature makes it possible to keep the label/filename
+ in sync with the content and thus makes it easy to check/monitor the
+ backups from the shell and/or normal file management tools, because
+ the filenames of the disk volumes match the content.
+
+ Notes: The configuration option could be "Relabel after Recycling = Yes".
+
+
+
+========= New items after last vote ====================
+
+
+Note to renumber items use:
+scripts/renumber_projects.pl projects >1
+
+
+========= Add new items above this line =================
+
+
+============= Empty Feature Request form ===========
+Item n: One line summary ...
+ Date: Date submitted
+ Origin: Name and email of originator.
+ Status:
+
+ What: More detailed explanation ...
+
+ Why: Why it is important ...
+
+ Notes: Additional notes or features (omit if not used)
+============== End Feature Request form ==============
+
+
+========== Items put on hold by Kern ============================
+
+
+========== Items completed in version 5.0.0 ====================
+*Item : 'restore' menu: enter a JobId, automatically select dependents
+*Item : Deletion of disk Volumes when pruned (partial -- truncate when pruned)
+*Item : Implement Base jobs
+*Item : Restore from volumes on multiple storage daemons
+*Item : Enable/disable compression depending on storage device (disk/tape)
+*Item : Cause daemons to use a specific IP address to source communications
+*Item : "Maximum Concurrent Jobs" for drives when used with changer device
+*Item : List InChanger flag when doing restore.
+*Item : Port bat to Win32
+*Item : An option to operate on all pools with update vol parameters
+========== Item completed after 5.0.0 ==========================
+*Item : Add ability to Verify any specified Job.