I am using Amanda 2.4.3b3 on a Linux RH 7.2 box to dump several
windows clients to disk. I discovered a problem yesterday with my
process. I run all of the backup jobs from a script. Each backup is a
full backup. When one job completes, the next job runs. This all works
correctly if the backup server is able to access the machine. If it is
not able to connect to the machine, prehaps the machine is off, the
existing backup files are overwritten. Does anyone know of a way to
prevent this from happening? If it fails, I want it to leave the
existing backup files.
The dumpcycles are set to 0 and the number of tapes is 1. I am just
getting the system going, and I did not have a good feel for how much
drive space was going to be consummed by the backups.
If any one cares, this is how the system works.
I created a couple of web pages to allow the user
to add their machines to the backup list. The web pages are restricted
via ip address. The user is informed that this is experimental and
that they should also backup their data to zip disk or cd. The user is
also instructed to contact the support person to make changes to the
computers to allow the backups to happen. We only backup "My
Documents" and Eudora. The users enters some basic information into a
form and some information like IP address is collected behind the
scenes. The data from the form is added to a mysql
database. Initially, my plan was to have the users submit a date and
time to run the backup. The users did not like this idea. I guess too
much work for them. Good thing I guess, as I read some time there
after that I could not run concurrent amdump jobs.
I wrote a "C" program to construct everything else. Before doing this,
I had to construct some template files for amanda.conf, changer.conf,
and the disklist. I use sed to create the useable files. Anyways, the
program checks for any new additions to the list. I have 2 servers to
backup 80 machines in 5 different buildings. Each server runs the
program and only looks for certain subnets. If a new machine has been
added, it creates all of the directories, files, and tapes. Next the program
looks through the list for its machines and creates a shell script to
perform the backups and uses "at" to schedule the script. As I said
this al works fine. The only problems I have run into have been with
ZoneAlarm and the users PC not being set up correctly.
Thanks
Jonathan Swaby
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