Greets to all of you,

as some of you may have noticed on amanda-users-ml I ran into trouble
when trying to restore data on an older server (and I am still in
trouble there).

This is the perfect lesson to remember that one should test restores
regularly.

Couldn't we build this *into* amanda?

I imagine something like:

After successful amdump (ran by cron, so that the testing would be
includable into doing the backups), amanda chooses one of the DLEs
dumped onto the current tape, amrestores it to a temporary space ...

There could be parameters like:

- testrestore yes|no
        switch it on off

- testrestore_cycle num_days
        how often to do these tests     

- testrestore_filelist file
        containing a list of dirs/files that were placed for testing,
        and which are pretty static on the given DLE
        Maybe even with MD5-checksums or something like that.

- testrestore_tmpdir
        where to restore those files to

- testrestore_tmpdir_size
        how much space to take there (similar to holdingdisk-handling)

...

I think you get the picture.

This is a rough idea, and has to be discussed, sure.

I think this would greatly help to improve the overall quality of
Amanda-backups, and as well add to the outstanding role Amanda has
amongst backup-suites. Do other suites have that feature?


I am looking forward to your opinions.

Greetings, Stefan.