Thomas Widhalm wrote:

Hi!

Sorry, if I'm asking something obvious, but I recently got to manage an
amanda server and do not have that much experience with amanda. And we
encountered some problems recently.

We used a very old workstation to do some backups on tape until the tape
drive died. So we put in a raid of 2 200GB IDE hard disks to be our
holding disks and just don't flush to tape anymore.

My problem is now, that amanda still shows the tapes in amoverview. May
I delete all tapes from the configuration and amanda will still work? Or
do I have to leave at least one tape in the configuration.

You may "amrmtape" all of them.  Beware that you also erase the online
information from those tapes: if you ever want to restore from them, you
cannot use "amrecover" (but you can use "amrestore").

I know, that there are better ways to get amanda save to hard disk, but
we needed a quick workaround and I'll switch to hard disk backup as soon
as I have some spare time.

Create the virtual tapes:

  # mkdir /space/vtapes
  # chown amanda:disk /space/vtapes
  # su - amanda
  $ mkdir -p /space/vtapes/daily/slots
  $ cd /space/vtapes/daily/slots
  $ for i in 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14; do mkdir slot$1; done
  $ ln -s slot1 data

In the above: create as many slots as you have specified "tapecycle"
in the amanda.conf.

And finally lets see if it works:

  $ ammt -f file:/space/vtapes/daily/slots status

in amanda.conf:

  tpchanger "chg-disk"
  tapedev "file:/space/vtapes/daily/slots"
  changerfile "/home/amanda/daily/changerfile"  # contains statusinfo
  changerdev "changer"

Then label the tapes:

  $ amlabel daily DAILY-01 slot 1
  $ amlabel daily DAILY-02 slot 2
  ...
  $ amlabel daily DAILY-14 slot 14

And reset to first slot again:

  $ amtape daily reset

And you're ready for the first amdump/amflush.

See also the excellent explanation in:

http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Backup_server#File_driver.2FDisk_backups



--
Paul Bijnens, Xplanation                            Tel  +32 16 397.511
Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUM    Fax  +32 16 397.512
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