On Wed, Jul 02, 2003 at 10:18:50PM -0500, Michael D. Schleif wrote:
> Thank you, all of you, for your help -- I have a working amanda!
>
> Now, I am trying to understand amanda's built-in backup strategy. How
> can I know when `disk' will be backed up full or incremental?
>
> I do not have a changer, and I have more data across all disks than
> single tape capacity. Therefore, I want to stagger full backups, such
> that on any given tape, only one (1) system is full backup and all
> others are incremental backups.
Oh my gosh, someone coming into amanda wanting it to work the way it
was designed to run. :)) That's refreshing. So many new amanda
admins want to schedule all fulls one day and incrementals others.
Basically you should not worry about scheduling. That is amanda's job.
Remember, amanda is not a backup program (tar and dump are), it is a
backup scheduler. Well a few other things as well.
Amanda's scheduler and planner are designed to spread out the full
backups over your specified dumpcycle. You specify the dumpcycle,
not the specific days. Let amanda decide what to do when. As an
example, suppose a system is temporarily down just when one of its
file systems is scheduled to get a full dump. If YOU do the scheduling,
will you remember it missed the full dump and maybe adjust the schedule
to get one the next day? Amanda will. Or suppose someone drops ten
cdrom images onto a file system at the same time. Amanda will note
this and think it better to tomorrow's full backup today because the
incremental will be so big today.
Getting started (once you are ready to go online) involves deciding
on what entities to backup, whether they will fit on a single tape
(or need to be split somehow), what program to use for the backup
of each entity and how to compress if you do.
The entities are called "DiskList Entries" (DLE's). Create your
disklist with all your entries but at the start comment all of them
out. Uncomment one or two entries from each system (server and clients)
and make sure amcheck doesn't complain.
Before running your first "real" amdump, consider which DLE's are
exposed (uncommented). Will level 0's of all of them fit onto a tape?
If not, comment out a few. Remember, when amanda sees a DLE for the
first time, it MUST do a full backup of that DLE. So do not, repeat,
do not, expect amanda to do all of your DLE's the first amdump run.
Each subsequent day uncomment a couple more DLE's. Once amanda has
seen all the DLE's she will start moving around the level-0's and
incrementals trying to even out the size of a daily backup. This
will take several dumpcycles (i.e. weeks) but eventually will settle
into a rhythm.
jl
--
Jon H. LaBadie jon AT jgcomp DOT com
JG Computing
4455 Province Line Road (609) 252-0159
Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)
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