Re: Backing up Amanda

Dwight Tovey wrote:

I used to work on a system that used Legato NSR as the backup/restore
solution.  In order to make life a little simpler in case of catastrophic
failure, I used to periodically take a tar image of the nsr configuration
and index files.  This way when I needed to do a full restore of the disk
that held these files I could just restore that tape first and nsr would
then be able to handle everything else without having to re-index all the
regular tapes.  Saved my butt more than once.

Do people do anything similar with Amanda?

If that is a reasonable thing to do, what are the minimum required files
that should be saved?

Thanks

    /dwight

This is Linux-specific, but my disaster recovery strategy is acombination of Amanda and mkCDrec:


http://mkcdrec.ota.be/

aka:

http://mkcdrec.sourceforge.net/

This is a makefile based system for creating a bootable and installablecopy of your Linux system and configuration files. I didn't properlytest it before commissioning my current file/tape server, but on myprevious server I performed a pre-commissioning test by deleting thepartition table and my mkCDrec CD booted and performed a perfect baremetal recovery. It did all the partitioning, software RAID setup andeverything.

Of course, you have to configure an exclude list that trims your filesystem down to one or two CDs, but that is where Amanda comes in; justmake sure you aren't excluding any Amanda files on your CD.

I've set up a cron job to create mkCDrec ISO images every night, and Imanually burn one very occasionally. The goal is to have the imagesstored on another computer, and then I can hopefully burn last night'simage at need or in the worst case use an offsite copy.

Hopefully I'll never need all this, but the setup was painless and Isleep better having it.


- Bruce