On Mon, 9 Jun 2003 at 4:58pm, Daniel Bentley wrote

> Groups A, B, and C are collections of samba shares on individual desktops.  
> As things stand, A, B, and C are defined by the current backup scripts so 
> that they equal right around 10G each.  A total of 30G to be backed up.  
> It needs to be the full 30G, as management has INSISTED on full backups 
> for these 30G (not only on full backups, but due to the fact that no 
> writable Samba shares are allowed (even passworded), Amanda can't keep 
> track for incrementals since it can't have write access to the shares 
> (according to /docs/SAMBA).  
*snip*

> As people stay late and come in early at various, random times, we have a 
> time frame of 5 hours to run the backup in.  Even if it is possible to 
> span Amanda dumps over multiple tapes, 30G would push the backup time 
> well over 5 hours (Amanda clocked the drive at 'speed 948 kbytes' at 
> setup, averages around 1100 k/s during backups).

Not necessarily.  If you have enough holding space, amanda could stream 
all three dumps to disk at once, and then tape them at its leisure.

> Thus, I can do 10G a day, a lil' over 2 hours a day, have each group being 
> backed up twice a week, and even keep a set schedule as it currently is 
> ('Make absolutely sure you leave your machine on on days X and Y, that's 
> when it'll be backed up').

I refuse to rely on users for something as important as backups.

> Now, is there a way to do something like this with Amanda, a way to define 
> set groups like this via different configs and share the same pool of 
> tapes?  Is there a way where I can indeed tell Amanda '30G of people to 
> backup, do only 10G a day, but make sure every one is backed up at least 
> twice in one week'?

You really want to keep everything in one config.  In the sample 
amanda.conf, look at some of the dumptype options.  There's stuff like 
"skip-incr" that will only do level 0s.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University