On Thu, Feb 27, 2003 at 11:47:18PM -0800, Bao Ho wrote:
> 
> 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?
> 

Amanda keeps a database. You can lookup the tapes for restore with
amadmin. The exact level, date and restore instructions are at the
beginning of every tape file. The worst restore case just means
reading all tape headers and looking for the latest level zero.

There is documentation in the source package under docs/RESTORE
describing recovery in case of Amanda server failure.

> 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.

If you do backups to tape, please use at least a small holding disk
to improve tape streaming. Your drive will be happy.

I would use Samba only, if the mail machine runs Windows. If it runs
some UNIX flavour, the native client is IMHO better, because you can
backup permissions etc. And backing up the whole server is nice for
disaster recovery.

-- 
Dietmar Goldbeck, Senior Consultant, <dietmar.goldbeck AT neteligent DOT de>
Neteligent GmbH, http://www.neteligent.de/
Walter-Benjamin-Platz 6, 10629 Berlin, Germany 
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