On Wed, Sep 10, 2003 at 12:48:35PM +0200, Mark Le Noury wrote:
> I guess I wanted it to do full backups on the Saturday just for ease of
> administration. That way I would know exactly which tapes the full dumps
> were on and I could send them to storage accordingly.
There are two common ways of handling off-site storage with amanda:
1) Set up a separate 'archive' config with noinc and norecord turned
on and run this (usually) once a month to make a backup for long-term
archival storage.
2) Send a full tapecycle's worth of tapes offsite.
There might be another setting or three that has to be turned on for #1
to both work properly and not interfere with the normal daily backups;
I can't say for sure because we don't do archival backups. We run here
with a one-week dumpcycle and three tapecycles worth of tapes. At any
given time, the two oldest dumpcycles' worth of tapes are in the server
room and the most recent dumpcycle is in a safe-deposit box at the bank.
> I'm just a bit worried, for example, that the full dump for 1 disk on 1
> server gets done on a Monday, while the full dump for another disk on
> another server gets done on a Tuesday etc.
Why does this worry you? As long as you know that every disk will get
at least one full dump per dumpcycle, what difference does it make if
they're not all on the same tape?
> I have five disks per server, 15 in all. I would like to be able to pick
> up a tape and say "this is a tape with a full dump on it" or even "this
> is a tape with a few full dumps on it".
Well, that's easy! With 15 disks, it's pretty much guaranteed that amanda
will put at least one full dump on each and every tape, so you can pick up
_any_ of your tapes and say, "This is a tape with a few full dumps on it."
> If I let amanda do the scheduling then maybe one tape will have some
> incremental dumps on it as well as a full dump of some arbitrary disk -
Nope, no maybe about it. Every tape will look like that, by design.
Spreading things out and doing a few fulls and a lot of incrementals each
night allows for more efficient use of both tape space and backup time.
> a bit of a management nightmare.
How so? Amanda manages it all herself and, if you need a certain file
(or group of files) from a certain date, all you have to do is ask
her which tape they're on (assuming that indexing is on, of course).
Not much of a nightmare, if you ask me. On the contrary, I sleep better
knowing that she's got my back.
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