Antonios Christofides said:
> Hi,
>
> I know this has been discussed before, but I need some more ideas.
> I've recently switched from homegrown script to Amanda, and although
> backup works fine, I haven't made the recovery plan yet, I'm doing
> so
> now.
>
> Suppose the server blows-up and that the few items that survived the
> explosion are soaked in the fire brigade's water. I need to rebuild
> the
> server from scratch, and the only thing I have is the tapes. How do
> I
> know which tape has which backup levels for each partition?
>
> The answer given to this some weeks ago was to print the amanda
> report
> each time, and store the hard printed reports together with the
> tapes.
> This works, but I find it inconvenient; essentially it doubles tape
> storage complexity - instead of storing a number of tapes, I have to
> store a number of tapes plus an equal (at least) number of pieces of
> paper.
>
> So I thought of this alternative: place the amanda index and log
> files
> (and, maybe, amanda reports, but not hard printed) on a small
> partition
> which is always fully backed up, and always last on tape (so that it
> contains the updated information about that tape's backups). So I
> recover that partition, and then I run amrecover or amrestore or
> something and the rest is figured out by amanda. The only thing I
> need
> to find out is which is the most recent tape, but I don't think
> that's
> too difficult; it will either be the tape which precedes a missing
> tape (which is presumably reduced to ashes), or it may be
> remembered,
> and it can be verified with a "dd if=/dev/nst0 bs=32k".
>
> You think this would (a) work, and (b) be a good idea?
>

I don't think this would work. AFAIK, you can't back up the index
and log files for the current backup onto the current backup. Plus,
there's no way to guarantee that this partition is the last one
backed up onto tape. Plus, even if you could guarantee that, there
would be no way of knowing how many backup images are on the tape,
so you couldn't do "mt fsf <somenumber>" to get to where you want to
be on tape.

Perhaps you could try something like an index/log backup script
every day. Just copy the index and log files onto removable media
and store them with the backup tapes. Alternately, find a non-local
machine and rsync the index and log files onto it via the network.
You could even use an internet shell account with a few MB of local
storage for this purpose; perhaps your ISP can provide this for you.