Bruno Negrão wrote:

Yes, I see that as a valid potential way to go, if only it
was that simple the script you are suggesting could run in
advance of the amanda-server startup.

yes, in your crontab file you could add a line like this:
(say the script would be called dlmaintainer)

00 2 * * * (dlmaintainer && su amanda -c "amdump DailySetX")

(the parentesis are not needed, actually, and I would put
amdump in the crontab of amanda itself, instead of root and
not needing to do a su -- but that's only details.)

But the problem is that the disks that you want to add
to disklist with the yet-te-written program "dlmaintainer"
are on the clients.  So you're pushing the real problem inside
this program.  How can a program on the server get to each
client and get the uptodate disklist for that client back
to the server.  Not easily accomplished...

What I use in my disklist is a setup like:


#first this very big directory gets his own dle
bigserver  /bigdisk/verybig/subdir  /bigdisk  {
        comp-user-tar
        include "./verybig/subdir"
        }  1
# all files/dirs A-M, except bigdir
bigserver  /bigdisk/files_A-M  /bigdisk {
        comp-user-tar
        include "./[a-mA-M]"
        exclude "./bigdir"
        }  1
# all files/dirs N-Z
bigserver  /bigdisk/files_N-Z  /bigdisk {
        comp-user-tar
        include "./[n-zN-Z]"
        }  1
# all the rest, include .xxx files etc
bigserver  /bigdisk/files_rest /bigdisk {
        comp-user-tar
        exclude append "./[a-mA-M]"
        exclude append "./[n-zN-Z]"
        }  1


The trick here is to divide large chunks, and keep a "rest"
chunk that includes everything else.  Now even clients
that create files/directories on places where they shouldn't
are still included in the backup.

You need 2.4.3 at least for this to work, and, because
of a bug in 2.4.4p1, you need 2.4.4p1-20030716 to get the
first entry (without wildcards) to work.



--
Paul Bijnens @ Home