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Re: Amanda backup levels
2004-04-21 04:06:39
Jeroen Heijungs wrote:
Probably very stupid questions, but can someone shed some light on very simple
questions: what exactly are
the differences between the different levels of backup? I searched the
documentation and arcives but so far
I have not found the exact definitions.
Level n backup is a backup where you save what has changed since the
last level n backup. period.
As I understand:
- level 0 is full-backup
- level 1 is incremental backup, based on modification time (?)
- what are the higher levels ???
You can do L0 backups once a month, L1 backups once a week, and L2
backups everyday.
So, everyday, you will save what you changed since the last L2 backup,
that is to say since the day before.
I explain that though now I hate incremental backups and pray for not
having to do with them anymore.
They may look fun (and indeed they DO are very well managed by Amanda)
but it may turn to nightmare when you have to restore some directories
with changes in different level backups, and one of you tape fails...
I ask now, because untill now we "only" had to backup FreeBSD servers acting as
routers, gateways.
firewalls, mailrelayservers etc. None of them had real fast-changing user-data,
so up-to-date restores were
not an high-priority issue and we never had to restore something (rock-solid
os!).
But now we are moving to imap-mail and that means that there are lots of
user-data which change very often
and have to restore more often (users delete mail-folders accidently), so I
have to be sure that all changed
data is backed-up every run, users do not want mails missing.
In my company, we use OpenBSD as an imap server, and FreeBSD as a samba
server, and the files are changing very fast. So we do L0 backups
everynight.
If you can afford, avoid incremental backups.
Last question:
- are there gui-frontends for the restore, that work for the helpdesk staff
(they cannont work with the
amrestore interface) ?
No. I heard they were people working on a web frontend, but hey, when
you restore some data, are you sure you will have a gui running ? Are
you even sure you will have any network working ?
The command line interface is simple enough to be usable in the worst
situation, think about that.
PS. CALLING ALL CARS : Are the guys working on the web frontend reading
this e-mail ?
--
Nicolas Ecarnot
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