Amanda-Users

Re: Is it a bad idea to share the /holdingdisk/ area among several concurrent dump sets?

2004-01-27 21:30:30
Subject: Re: Is it a bad idea to share the /holdingdisk/ area among several concurrent dump sets?
From: Kurt Yoder <kylist AT shcorp DOT com>
To: martin.schmidt AT jielo DOT de
Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 21:27:06 -0500
Restores work fine too; I have done them many times. From the client you do "amrecover GreenSet". If you make sure to store the logs, indexes, and everything else in separate directories specific to each set, there is no danger of collisions.

I also make use of the "include" directive in each set's configuration file. I set specifics such as dump cycle in each set's configuration file, then "include" the "master" configuration file, which contains settings such as tape type and points to the global disk list.

I'm not aware of any "amindex", so I can't comment on that.

On Jan 27, 2004, at 5:57 PM, Martin Schmidt wrote:

Hi,

I was looking in the mailing list because of an other problem and I read Your
prescription of different backups on different days.
I considered and tested something like You described, I found the backups
work.
I have to store a backup out of the house, so I decided "odd weeks" are green and even weeks are red, labeled the tapes that way, so one week the green
tapes are out of the house and I  am backing up to red ones, and so on.
They are different configs, each with it's own dir on the holding disk,
index/log/... dirs, etc.



Have You tested restore?
Is it just as easy as "amrecover GreenSet" or so ?
Does amindex work with such a config-mix ?

regards


Martin




Am Mittwoch, 3. Dezember 2003 16:02 schrieb Kurt Yoder:
Mark_Conty AT cargill DOT com said:
Hi --

I did a search through the FAQ-O-Matic and through the Yahoo egroup
for
'share holding' and didn't find anything specific in response to
this
question, so I think it's safe to ask:

        Is it a bad idea to have a central /holdingdisk/ area in use by
        multiple concurrent dump sets?

If you're worried about collision of holding disk directories, you
can set a different subdirectory for each configuration. So config1
uses /holdingdisk/config1/. config2 uses /holdingdisk/config2/, etc.
All configs may use any holding disk space that is available, and
you won't get any collisions.

But before you answer that, maybe I should ask this:

        Is it a bad idea to run multiple concurrent dump sets in the first
place?

(While searching the egroup archive for an answer to this, I came
across
comments from some of the Amanda veterans that led me to believe
that I
should be using a _single_ backup set, instead of running multiple
concurrent ones.  Am I reading that correctly?  If so, then the
original
question is moot...)

It depends on what you want to do; what do you mean by concurrent? I
use multiple dump sets: a daily set that runs every day except
Wednesday. On Wednesdays, I write to a separate weekly set unless
it's the first Wednesday of the month. If 1st Wed of month, I write
to a separate monthly set unless it's first Wed of year. If 1st Wed
of year, I write to a separate yearly set. This setup lets me keep
archival offsite backups.

So I use multiple sets, but only for archival purposes.

BTW, to do what I do requires more than the standard "call
amcheck/amdump from cron" method, since there's no way I know of in
cron to specify "day before 1st Wednesday of month unless 1st
Wednesday of year", etc. I wrote a script to pick which set to
check/dump; this script is called from cron every day. It in turn
calls amdump or amcheck with the correct backup set. If you don't
mind looking at hacked-together perl code, you can go look at it.
It's at

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ampick/

<snipped>




<Prev in Thread] Current Thread [Next in Thread>