Hallo Karsten, dear Amanda users,

i am wondering if it is possible to check how much data is already
written in the curent run of amdump/amflush.

>

In the output of amstatus is just an overwiev per filesystem, but i am interested how much of that particular filesystem is already on tape and for example the estimated time.

As I was/am interested in the progress of Amanda too I was motivated
enough to enhance amstatus into producing (X)HTML output and to be used
as a CGI script.

Though amstatus, as it is, only gives summary information, it already
parses all important information from the amdump(.X) file(s). Internally
it knows many things like start/end times of individual dumps or tape
writes, sizes of files, compression ratio etc. That is, what I exploit
partly with my extension and reveal it (I hope nicely) formatted.

What amstatus does not have (as it isn't contained in the amdump(.X)
files) is real progress information.

| Gene Heskett wrote:
| > The pointers into the filesystem representing the files currently
| > seeked position are private to tar.

Amanda can't record progress in the amdump files, because the actual
dumping is done via third party programs, like dump/restore or tar.
There is no interface for reporting progress with all the different
external dump programs. Thus only start and end of a dump are recorded
and directly available to amstatus.

But: amstatus, while a backup is running
- CAN look at the file size of the holding disk files, even when they
  are just written, with some error, sure, but good enough for a
  valuable estimate most of the time.
- CAN estimate (very rough) times of dumps done directly to tape
  from calculations of average dump/tape speed and the estimated
  size of the dump. This may be _very_ rough, as stop/rewind/start times
  of a tape not streaming are simply unknown to amanda at all.

What I would like to have recorded in the amdump files is
_taper_progress_, as this seems to me easily determinable by
amanda and would help a lot in the detailed display.

For a sample (still that well known one pre alpha HTML, don't visit
now, if you have seen it already; a major update will be in place
Sunday evening) look at:

  http://www.osgev.de/other/amanda/index.html

That is (now) the output of a finished backup (ignore the 'just running'
message, it's a pre alpha error).

Please note, that, while a backup is running, the output _indicates_
progress already (partially as is):

- the overview lines are colored differently, indicating partition state
- the overview percentage bars (done with considerable effort, thanks to
  my son Hauke) ain't fake: they give estimated progress of the
  partition dumping/taping.

Missing in the pre alpha is the progress estimate in the detailed view
and summary information is missing at all, including the estimated time
to finish the whole backup.

Just now I have converted my old 2.4.2 work to 2.4.4, while trying to
still support 2.4.2, changed the output to work well even with > 80
partitions backed up and a total backup time of > 12 hours. Please
DON'T look at the samples (URL above) before Sunday, 2003-12-21 20:00:00
if you have seen them before.

Happy christmas

Georg
--
 ___   ___
| + | |__    Georg Rehfeld      Woltmanstr. 12     20097 Hamburg
|_|_\ |___   georg.rehfeld.nospam AT gmx DOT de    +49 (40) 23 53 27 10

             (Delete .nospam from mail address)