Advice for setup and backup strategy needed

Hi,

I'm quite new to amanda but as far as I have read about it and after
some first tries, it seems that it could do the job for our needs, but I
would need some advice for a backup strategy and for how to setup up amanda

I will describe you our current situation and our needs as well as my
thoughts of how to do it.

Every help is very apreciated!


We are planing to change from hard-disk backup (mirroring) to use amanda
to backup our RAID storage(s) with a total of 9 TB available on a 8x
LTO-2 (200GB) tape changer.

Currently about 4.8 TB of total storage space on three partitions is used:
  - 3.0T on a 3.3T RAID,
  - 1.4T on a 1.9T RAID and
  - 0.4T on another 1.9TB RAID.

Most of the stored data will not change over time, but the total amount
of data will (slowly) grow.

So what we would need is an initial full backup followed by regular
(maybe daily) incremental backups (which will be quite small)

Of course it is possible to split up the backup into smaller chunks
(single directories, not 3.3 T at once) but most of these smaller chunks
still would be greater then the 200G tapes we have and therefor I would
use tape-spanning.

Most of these directories have the following structure:

- directory1
   +- bigdata (> 200 GB, but does not change [often])
   +- otherdata (smaller [<< 200 GB], but changes more often)
- directory2
   +- bigdata
   +- otherdata
- ...


This could maybe used to define different backup-set:
- set(s): bigdata:
    contains the 'bigdata' subdirectory of one (ore more,
    depending on total size) directories be run maybe manually when
    new files are added.
- set(s): otherdata:
    contains the 'otherdata' sub-directories of various directories and
    which will be run on daily basis with maybe monthly or two-weekly
    full backup

Is this possible and does it make sense to split up the directories on
sub-directory basis into two (well actually more) backup sets ('big' and
'other')?

And if this would be the right way to do it, how would I configure the
different sets?

Maybe you could give me a general hint on how to use tape-spanning,
especially how to configure the 'runtapes' parameter.
Am I right that I have to configure it that 'runtapes' * 'size-of-tape'
= 'total_size_to_backup'? So, that when I have to backup let's say 1TB I
would need a minimum of runtapes=5 that the whole (full) backup fits on
the tapes ( 5 x 200GB)?

Thanks in advance,
koppi

-- 
Grupo de Tecnologia Musical (MTG)
Universidad Pompeu Fabra (UPF), Barcelona, Espana
http://www.iua.upf.es/mtg/
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