Restored her! I barely taped her!

Well I found a fun discovery in the last couple of days. Turns out that I was not backing up what I thought I was backing up. Along with that, I found that restorations don't work like I thought they would.

The first discovery happened because I read somewhere online that "[paraphrased] A backup is a backup ONLY if it can be restored", and I realised that I was in that exact position. I had several rounds of "backups" that I could supposedly restore, but since I had not tested that functionality, I could not say that I had true "backups". So I set out to fully restore one of the backups I had taken, in order to prove that the backup strategy worked. 

During the attempt to restore, I noticed that the backup I was trying to restore didn't contain all the files that I thought it had. After further investigation, several of the backups didn't contain all the files either. This meant that I if needed too, I would lose all of those files to the failure. It wouldn't be a complete loss as those files can be recreated, but it would take time and a lot of patience. 

Looking into WHY these files weren't saved, I discovered that I had at some point placed a CACHEDIR.TAG file in the directory. For context, the "tar" command allows you to skip directories picked up by tar by placing a CACHEDIR.TAG file in the directory and setting a flag on the tar command. I setup my tape backups to work this same way so I could dynamically add temporary directories in my NAS (organisation, scripting, etc), without the worry of the backup picking up the 1000s of random files I have from scripting, ripping, failed experiments, and so on. I guess at some point I had stuck a CACHEDIR.TAG file in the directory to test some functionality, and forgotten that I had placed it there. 

The next discovery I had was that the restore did not work the way I expected it too. Please note that I did NOT RTFM, as its a well written document that I get about a paragraph in and give up. I don't book learn well, and as well written as the documentation is, I can't really make heads or tails of it. It's partially because they consistently use term/ideas that I'm only half familiar with (cause I didn't RTFM), partially because I'm answers focused and don't want to read 3 paragraphs for a 2 line explanation of things, and partially because it may not answer the question anyway. If you want to see what I mean, Here's a simple question: "If I select a directory as a file to restore, which shows its size as 8kb, Will it restore recursively?" and here's a couple of wonderful resources for you:
https://bacularis.app/doc/bacula-basics/run-restore.html
https://www.bacula.org/5.1.x-manuals/en/main/main/Restore_Command.html

The answer found out after a couple rounds of trial and error, is......yes. If you select a directory as the "file" to restore, Bacula/Bacularis will restore the whole directory, or at least it will attempt to, I had to cancel it, Since I don't have the patients to run the FULL restore, when restoring a couple select files will prove the point just as easily. Especially because the last backup took about 40 hours to MAKE. 

Anyway, I learned that I should always double check my backups to make sure its backing up what i think its backing up. I also learned more about my tape system, which is a positive. The flip side of that is that now my backups are taking 6-7TB instead of 4.5TB, so I might need to order another round of tapes just to have the storage capacity for multiple backups. Yay Homelabs!