"Carl D. Blake" <carl AT boeckeler DOT com> wrote:
 >On Tue, 2002-11-12 at 10:56, mcguire AT cs.utexas DOT edu wrote:
 >> 
 >> 
 >> "Carl D. Blake" <carl AT boeckeler DOT com> wrote:
 >>  >I'm trying to setup an AMANDA backup system with the following
 >>  >characteristics:
 >>  >  Full backup every Wednesday on a different weekly tape
 >>  >  Differential backup on Thurday, Friday, Monday, and Tuesday
 >>  >  Full backup on the last Wednesday of each month which is then
 >>  >          archived for a year.
 >> 
 >> Comments or suggestions?  You are trying to swim upstream.
 >> 
 >> Tommy McGuire
 >Could you explain what you mean by this?  What is a better way to handle
 >this?  I would prefer to use amanda the way it was meant to be used
 >rather than try to force her into some peculiar mode.

Amanda is really very good at set-it-and-forget-it backups: you tell it
what you want to back up, how often you want a full backup, and how many
tapes to use.  It figures out when to do what level of backup to spread
out your backups across the schedule.

For example, we have two configurations.  The daily config, which is run
6 nights per week, is set to do a full backup of each filesystem every
two weeks, incrementals in between, and to update the equivalent of
/etc/dumpdates with when it does what level.  The archive config, which
runs once a week, doesn't do incremental backups, doesn't record what
it does, and does a full backup of each filesystem once a month.  This
configuration is very similar to what is described above except that
it doesn't mention what day of the week or month things are supposed to
happen.

Do I know what level the daily config is doing for a particular
filesystem on a given day?  Not really.  Do I know what week a
particular filesystem will get archived?  Nope.  Do I care?  No.  When
we have to restore something, Amanda tells us what tapes to get it off
of.  What does it get us?  Back before Amanda, when we had a schedule
somewhat like that above, the archive run once a month was taking
between two and three days.  Some of the dailys wanted several tapes
and others less than half of one.  This was a while back; that kind of
config wouldn't work for us at all now.

When you try to tell Amanda to do a full backup every Wednesday, or to
do a full backup of everything the last Wednesday of the month, you are
trying to manually do something that Amanda was designed to automate.
You're not using Amanda's power and you're going have to do perverted
things to the configuration to get it to work at all, which it probably
won't.  You are swimming upstream, and it would be easier to write your
own backup scripts to follow your schedule.  If you need Amanda's power,
you have to let it handle the scheduling.

Tommy McGuire