On Tue, 2002-11-12 at 14:43, mcguire AT cs.utexas DOT edu wrote:
>
>
> "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.
>
This sounds similar to what I want to do with our backups. I've been
trying to get used to the idea of not knowing when a full backup or an
incremental backup occurs. This is why I was asking for comments and
suggestions.
> 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.
>
I would prefer to let amanda handle the scheduling. I'm just having
trouble figuring out a reasonable configuration where I can get weekly
full backups as well as monthly (or every 4 weeks) full backups that I
can archive for a year.
You mention that your archive config runs once a week and does monthly
backups for each filesystem. Is that configuration something like:
dumpcycle 0
runspercycle 4
tapecycle 52
where dumpcycle 0 tells amanda to perform full backups every time,
runspercycle 4 tells amanda to put the full backups on 4 tapes, and
tapecycle 52 provides enough tapes for a year?
Also, how many tapes do you use for your daily config? Is it enough to
cover an entire month?
> Tommy McGuire
--
Carl D. Blake
Director of Engineering
Boeckeler Instruments, Inc.
4650 S. Butterfield Dr.
Tucson, AZ 85714
Phone: 520-745-0001
FAX: 520-745-0004
email: carl AT boeckeler DOT com
.com
|
