Hai Joshua:

I am really excited to know more about AMANDA now. 

What I understand is that, first amanda will take a level 0 backup (full
backup) and then for the following days, it will take level 1. 

If suppose, amanda takes level 0 on sunday and then level 1, with respect
to 0 on mon/tue/wed/thu/fri/sat. 

Now I have files named a, b, c, d, e, etc on my filesystem. I have the
full backup on sunday.

File "a" is modified on monday, so the level 1 backup on monday will just
have file "a".

File "b" is modified on tuesday, so the backup on tuesday will have just
file "b" but not file "a" due to just level 1 backup.

File "c" and file "a" are modified on wednesday, so that day's backup will
have files "a" and "c". 

At some point of time, if I want to backup all the files, then I have to
contact all the tape drives. Is this the case? Or will amanda tell me on
which tape drives are these files located? How do I search for a
particular file in the backup?

So if just file "a" is written into the tape drive1, how can we use the
rest of the space on the tapedrive1?

Guess, these might be too trivial, but .. .


Regards,
Nitesh




On Tuesday 26 November 2002 07:15 pm, you wrote:
> On Tue, 26 Nov 2002 at 6:53pm, Nitesh Kumar A. wrote
>
> > Nice to receive an instant response from you.
>
> CCed back to the list so all can see.
>
> > When we schedule amanda to do the backup for us. What levels of backup
> > does it do daily/monthly?
> >
> > I mean, it backups some data today. Similar way it does tomorrow. Now
> > what is the difference between these two data?
>
> Amanda tends to run mostly level 0s and 1s.  It'll "bump" backups to
level
> 2 (or higher) if something gets too big and it needs to save space (and
> you can control the bump threshhold).  As I said below, the goal is for
> each night's backups to be about the same size.  A nice benefit of this
> scheme is that you generally will only need two tapes to do a full
restore
> of a filesystem.
>
> > Now if suppose I want to backup a file, say "xyz" from the tape, where
> > will it search for the file? Will it search for today's or tomorrow's?
>
> Ah, here it gest nicer.  You can specify the date from which you want
file
> xyz.  Want yesterday's version?  Ask for it.  Want last week's version
as
> well?  Ask for that too.  How far back you can go depends, of course, on
> your dumpcycle and tapecycle, but that's the general idea.