-----Original Message-----
From: Dietmar Goldbeck <dietmar.goldbeck AT neteligent DOT de>
To: bao <bao AT gibbons DOT com>
Cc: amanda <amanda-users AT amanda DOT org>
Date: Thursday, February 27, 2003 6:28 PM
Subject: Re: holding disk and full dumps


>On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 02:09:33PM -0800, bao wrote:
>>
>> 1. If I want to do a full dump of the entire selected folder every week,
>> and incremental dumps every other days (1 full, 6 inc. per week), does
>> it mean I have to rely on amanda in choosing what to do with load
>> balancing??
>>
>
>Yes. This is one advantage Amanda has over commercial utilities.
>She does all the scheduling and very well. You can force backups
>if you want with amadmin <config> force <host> <fs>.
>See manpage of amadmin.
>
>> 2. I read somewhere (which I can't find where and can't remember
>> exactly) that for full dumps or for tapeless backup, holding disk should
>> be set to no. When I set this to no, amanda complains that:
>> [can't dump no-hold disk in degraded mode]
>>
>> Please tell me what this means.
>
>This is usually bad advice, because you loose all parallism of Amanda
>and its ability to keep the tape streaming.  The only exception i can
>think of is if you are backing exactly one machine to the file output
>driver, using no holding disk makes sense.
>
What you thought is exactly my config. I have one server running mail
service, another for
file sharing and is where amanda is. In the past, I had Tapeware installed
on the second, which
mounted the mail folder on the first, and backed up both. Recently, Tapeware
has caused many
crashes and I am forced to switch to amanda.Tapeware has the advantages of
having a GUI,
where I could schedule both full and incremental, specify which day to run
the full, which to run
inc. This makes the restoration task much easier b/c I knew which tape
contained the last full, and
started from it.

If I have to rely on Amanda for choosing the full backup, is there any
difficulty in locating it? Like looking
for "tape" has the last full backup?

My future plan is to immitate the old one: have Amanda run just on one
machine, have it
mount the mail machine using samba, and back both up just like a single one.
This rather simplifies
it because the mail machine has only one folder that needs to be backed up.