Forcing Bacula full backups

Today I’ve seen something strange in Bacula reports. A host which was supposed to be scheduled for an Incremental backup asked for a tape from the Full backup pool.

How’s that? Full backups happens on the first Wednesday of the month, which is tomorrow!

Well, browsing the docs I’ve found the answer and was a very easy one. Yesterday I’ve changed the fileset of that host because I’ve added a new storage partition in /opt. Bacula then forced a Full backup to be sure that all the files included by the new fileset would be backed-up. In my single slot setup that meant stopping the whole backup flow, because a Weekly tape was inside the tape reader. After changing the tape with one from the Monthly pool and issuing an “update slots”, all the scheduled jobs (verify jobs included) got completed.

The lesson is: when you change the configuration, prepare for a Full backup to happen.