On Thursday 19 September 2002 01:45, Neil wrote:
>Hi guys,
>
>My amanda is now up and running. I can backup and restore
> filesystems now. But there is one thing that I noticed that
> really brought me to the point where I ask myself "why did it do
> it?". I was backing up /var and it has only 20 megs only and I
> got 4gig in my tape.
20 megs? Mmmm, mine is about 340. But then RH's up2date keeps its
download cache in there.
Post your disklist someplace please.
> I executed su amanda -c "amdump Daily".
> Backup went fine. I executed it again, and it was asking me to
> insert the tape on slot 2, 3, 4 and so on.
This is normal. Amanda will not reuse the same tape until the
"tapecycle" number of tapes has been used, as set in your
amanda.conf.
>What do you think about this? Should it just overwrite the earlier
> backup?
No, see above.
>Another one...
>I have in amanda crontab that it executes amdump every Saturday,
> 10pm. Do I need to rewind the tape before amdump backs it up?
No, amanda will do that. But most folks have an amcheck run
someplace before that so it will email you if the tape it needs is
not available.
> What I just wanted is to keep overwriting my old Saturday backup
> since I only have 1 tape for now. Please check out my amanda.conf
> in http://restricted.dyndns.org/amanda.conf
Your tapecycle is set to 25, and your mailto isn't you as normal
user. you only have one tape, and dumpcycle is 4 weeks, with
runspercycle at 20. Also the tapetype you used is only a 1970
megger, how did you get 4 gigs on it? A 500 meg holding disk is
not adequate for the average home system even. A successfull run
will leave the holding disk empty, but the capcity to act as a
buffer between the fast disks and the relatively slow tape make it
a huge time saver in the overlal scheme of things. One should have
something in excess of 2x a tapes capacity unless you have both a
fast tape, and its bigger than your whole hard drive setup. This
all needs to be adjusted.
>Is it possible with amanda that it is able to backup and restore a
> whole unix operating system(ex. FreeBSD).
No, because you need at least a working minimal install with the
filesystems formatted, and dd and tar plus whatever decompressor
was used to make the tapes compressions available before a restore
can be started. Such a system can be had from most of the one
floppy boots however.
> The reason I asked this
> is because of AIX unix backup/restore. It's quite cool. Even the
> tape was bootable.
That would be provided the bios could be set to boot from tape. I
personally have not seen such a bios except for a very old NCR
machine we scrapped for its cabinet. Its boot device was some sort
of an audio casette based drive, but the drive was fully servo'd,
triple motors and all that plus its heads were visibly shot. It
also had 2 of the 3M ten meg removable (the blue pie case with a
14" disk in it) drives, to say it was a bit of jurrasic park
technology wasn't an exageration.
>So here is what I wanted:
>1. Attach a second harddisk on the computer
>2. Restore the whole backed up FreeBSD to the second harddisk
>3. Remove the second harddisk and connect it to another machine
I don't see any reason why that couldn't be done provided the
controllers are compatible.
>Lastly, as my subject goes, is there any good web-based frontend
> for Amanda?
No. And likely never will be since thats not the main focus of the
amanda design, being as rock-solid dependable as the drive itself
has a much higher priority. Someone mentioned he was doing a gui
for amrestore a few weeks back but I haven't seen a release of any
code noted here on this list. However, in the case of a *real*
restore, rather than just going back after a file that was
accidentally deleted, where are you gonna get the gui to do the
restore with? Pretty good question, that. :-(
Amanda's basic tenet is to remove as much as possible, the human
operator and his mistakes from the backup reliability picture. To
that end its designed to be run as a cron job, with a tape changer
if possible, with the only human intervention being the changing of
the tapes when required. The human part other than shuffling tapes
should only come into the picture when its time to make a restore,
something you wouldn't wish to happen often enough to be well
trained in doing, and one of the reasons a test restore should be
done of a few files to trash directory once in a while.
>Thank you guys.
>
>Ronneil
--
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz 512M
99.15% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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