Hi,

I know this has been discussed before, but I need some more ideas.
I've recently switched from homegrown script to Amanda, and although
backup works fine, I haven't made the recovery plan yet, I'm doing so
now.

Suppose the server blows-up and that the few items that survived the
explosion are soaked in the fire brigade's water. I need to rebuild the
server from scratch, and the only thing I have is the tapes. How do I
know which tape has which backup levels for each partition?

The answer given to this some weeks ago was to print the amanda report
each time, and store the hard printed reports together with the tapes.
This works, but I find it inconvenient; essentially it doubles tape
storage complexity - instead of storing a number of tapes, I have to
store a number of tapes plus an equal (at least) number of pieces of
paper.

So I thought of this alternative: place the amanda index and log files
(and, maybe, amanda reports, but not hard printed) on a small partition
which is always fully backed up, and always last on tape (so that it
contains the updated information about that tape's backups). So I
recover that partition, and then I run amrecover or amrestore or
something and the rest is figured out by amanda. The only thing I need
to find out is which is the most recent tape, but I don't think that's
too difficult; it will either be the tape which precedes a missing
tape (which is presumably reduced to ashes), or it may be remembered,
and it can be verified with a "dd if=/dev/nst0 bs=32k".

You think this would (a) work, and (b) be a good idea?