Of course this would all be done with scripts from cron jobs. Agree on the
restore part. However, I would never restore critical data like this right
into production anyway.

Milos, if your intention is to avoid going back to tape for restores when
under time pressure to get your database working again, maybe the Amanda
FILE: driver is something to consider.

Bernhard

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Thomas Hu [mailto:thomash AT date DOT com]
> Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2003 12:09 PM
> To: 'Bernhard Beck'; mbrkic AT farelogix DOT com; amanda-users AT amanda DOT 
> org
> Subject: RE: differential vs incremental backups
>
>
> Dereferencing the symlinks is up to tar or gtar and I believe can be
> specified within amanda configuration. However, extra caution has to be
> taken in recovering as by default the link would be disconnected and
> filled in with actual data. Two issues can merge up. One is the disk
> space of filesystem where the links are. The other is you still need
> manually copy the data to where it is supposed to be.
>
> For production env, got to have a better way. Carefully organizing the
> filesystem/directory architecture and a few cron job lines would work.
> Or simple incremental backup of the whole filesystem would work too.
>
> Thomas
>
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
> [mailto:owner-amanda-users AT amanda DOT org] On Behalf Of Bernhard Beck
> Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2003 2:19 PM
> To: mbrkic AT farelogix DOT com; amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
> Subject: RE: differential vs incremental backups
>
> I'm looking at a similar problem here. One of the ideas we came up with
> was
> to create a current directory (e.g. /dbdumps/current) which gets backed
> up
> by Amanda. Inside are symlinks to the actual dump files in the daily
> directories (/dbdumps/01, /dbdumps/02, ...). Your daily DB dump script
> updates the symlinks in current when it is done.
>
> We haven't implemented this yet, but Amanda should dereference the
> symlinks
> and back up the right data. This way you always access the same DLE and
> get
> your normal Amanda behaviour.
>
> In your case, depending on what your dumps look like, you could run diff
> on
> today's and yesterday's  dump and only back up the result (Amanda always
> backs up whole files).
> In our environment this doesn't really matter though, since the dump
> files
> are changing pretty dramatically at times, so an incremental would look
> like
> a level 0 anyway most of the time.
>
> Personally, I'd feel safer with just backing up the whole dump every day
> and
> leave the job to Amanda.
>
> Your milage may vary of course.
>
> Bernhard
>
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: owner-amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
> > [mailto:owner-amanda-users AT amanda DOT org]On Behalf Of
> mbrkic AT farelogix DOT com
> > Sent: Tuesday, March 18, 2003 9:14 AM
> > To: amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
> > Subject: differential vs incremental backups
> >
> >
> > Hi,
> > I have a disk that is a cache for database backups
> > and is a set of 30 directories with database exports
> > of the last 30 days. I want to use Amanda to backup
> > ONLY the latest written directory every night,
> > without ever doing a full backup of the whole disk
> > (it is too big
> > to fit on one tape! :(  )
> >
> > In other words, is there a way to tell Amanda to
> > always back-up only the changes from the last run
> > regardless of dump levels. Equivalently, is there a way
> > to fool Amanda into thinking that a full backup was
> > done every night, after the level 1 completes
> > successfully.
> >
> > Any other ideas would be appreciated!
> >
> > Cheers,
> > Milos
> >
> >
> >
>
>