Jon LaBadie wrote:

On Tue, Jun 24, 2003 at 11:05:00AM -0700, bao wrote:

Jon LaBadie wrote:

On Tue, Jun 24, 2003 at 10:12:01AM -0700, bao wrote:

I forgot to state that this is a tapeless setup to back up to disk.
Then the full backup will be transferred to tape, and also is kept
on disk for one week.

I am _not_ letting Amanda schedule as to when to do a full backup,
as is recommended. What I want (actually, my boss) is to force
it to run a full every Monday, then a level 1 every other day for
the rest of the week, according to the most recent Monday.

I'm not familiar with the various "strategy" and other related
options, but can you set a strategy that always does a "no-full"
or "only-incremental" AND can also be forced with amadmin to do
full dumps on demand?

Jon, I am reluctant to try that, although I agree that it is
a good  candidate. This is because we had to do a recover
yesterday, when I didn't think that the system was ready
for it.  Such a relief that it worked, because a major part
of the data was deleted accidentally :)

I don't get the reluctance.  You don't mean you plan to put this
into effect as the actual one and only live backup system without
some testing do you?  :)  Besides, my idea, if it works, doesn't
eliminate the ability to have a separate FULL ONLY config.  Though
in that case I'd probably us a different set of "file tapes" and
"record no".

Back to my question, if I configure it as you suggested, would
the incrementals have any idea of the previous forced full dump,
and continue on from that point? Or would they go on after the
...very first full backup??

Well I wondered about the possibilities some more, and as I had
a file:driver setup for test purposes (good way to check out
exclude/include and other small changes) I did a little reading.

Yes Gene, there goes Jon again, reading the docs :)

Lo and Behold, on the amanda man page of all places:


    strategy "string"

        ...
         nofull
              Never do full backups, only level 1 incrementals.

        ...
         incronly
              Only do incremental dumps.  `amadmin force' should
              be  used  to tell Amanda that a full dump has been
              performed off-line, so that it resets to level  1.
              It is similar to skip-full, but with incronly full
              dumps may be scheduled  manually.   Unfortunately,
              it  appears  that Amanda will perform full backups
              with this configuration, which is probably a bug.


Also, another dumptype option entry was this paragraph:

    skip-full "boolean"
         Default:  no.  If true and planner has scheduled a full
         backup,  these  disks will be skipped, and full backups
         should be run off-line on these days.  It was  reported
         that Amanda only schedules level 1 incrementals in this
         configuration; this is probably a bug.

Not knowing which set of options had a good chance to work, I set
my dumpcycle and runspercycle to 1 day/1 and my strategy to "nofull".

I was very surprised when I ran my first amdump and got a full level 0.
As this was the first run for the disk, a level 0 should have been
scheduled, but I expected the "nofull" strategy to supercede and cause
an error.  Six subsequent amdumps were all incrementals.

I then set my dumpcycle to 0 days, normally something that would force
a level 0 each run.  Each of the next two amdumps each generated level 0's.

If yes, perhaps you can use just a single configuration.
The incremental only strategy would only cause incrementals daily
except the one following your forced "amadmin full".

To me, it seems a single config would work.  But you may have to experiment
with the dumptype options skip-full, strategy "nofull", and strategy "incronly"
to decide which is the proper approach.  Those options seem to be a real
muddy area in amanda.

If the answer to the question above is yes, then it would also work with two configurations

No, I don't think so, because in a config, you must do a full before you
can do ANY incrementals.  Perhaps you can get the ball rolling with one
forced level 0, I don't know.

I don't know if it will follow the full this coming Thu, or the last Thu.
Is there any way to check??

(and if the incrementals have an idea about the full). If so, the next question arises is do I need to have "record yes" in the full config,

in order for the incrementals to know??

The setting of record would definitely affect what files the incrementals
consider changed.  Without a record "yes", the incrementals would still
consider the last level 0, the last "recorded" one.