mogorva wrote:

This PC will be a remote PC (it will be really far away from here) and I will have only ftp access.

Not even ssh?

My task is to create a method to archive the data from the disk. Fortunately (or not) the data is quite static (this means it changes very rarely) so it's not neccessary to do regular (daily or weekly) archives but it's a must to make a full archive in the nitht when some data has changed. Full archive means to save everything (all the files and directories of the application) not just the changed files.

A frequent setup for this kind is using "rsync" to mirror the complete
filesystems to another machine.  Rsync is optimized for things like
this.  It transfers only the changes. Even binary files are not
transferred completely when only part of it changes.

Besides this, it is always good to make a local backup to tape too.
This does not consume any bandwidth at all.

I can handle this 'change management' (I can decide with a script if it's neccessary to make an archive or not) but I need some help to configure amanda.

The strength of amanda is the scheduling of the backups.  And I think
you won't make much use of that feature.
There are other points of course, in favor of using amanda too, but,
see below.

As I told we need to archive specific directories and files so my first question is: is it possible to archive files and directories or amanda can archive only whole disks and/or partitions?

Yes, this is possible, if you use gnutar as the backup program instead
of dump.  In the disklist (this used to be the list of "disks", but
nowadays it could be anything; that's why we call an entry in this file

a certain backup image.  Like this:

the.host.com Etc-Essentials  /etc  {
        comp-user-tar
        include "./passwd" "./group"
        include append "./X11" "./host*"
        include append "./vfs/modules"
}


This will add the files passwd and group and the directory X11 and files
and directories starting with "host", and the directory "./vfs/modules".

in your case.)
There are some limitations:
- if the list is assembled on the server, like above, there is a limit
  on the total length of the strings (not sure about the limit, I've
  never hit it).  To overcome this limit use "include list".
- The entries that have globs to expand may contain only 1 slash,
  or actually, anything containing more slashes than the initial "./"
  is not globbed, and taken literally.

The second question: We have tapes of 12 GB and an archive is going to be about 250-300 MB. We'd like to use a tape as long as it's possible without removing it from the drive (because it will be really far away from here). Can we 'force' amanda to use one tape until it's full?

Here you hit some fundamental design principals of amanda.
Amanda does not append to tapes. Basta.

Amanda was designed to take care of your data.  That's what backups are
for.  In this perspective "no append" is a feature, not a bug.
Besides the fact that this feature is quiet deep burried inside
amanda (changing it would be difficult!), think about it:  a stray
rewind of the tape, after a scsi-reset e.g. would make all of the
collected backup images overwritten by the next one.  For amanda this
means that the assumption to do a level 1 because yesterday a level 0
was done, would be not be valid anymore. You would lose everything
on the tape.   Very difficult to detect: today's backup did succeed,
didn't it, but you just lost the level 0 that was on the same tape!

The usual way around this, for those people that have bought too
expensive tapes, is to configure a large holdingdisk, and let the
backup images collect, and flush once a week or so, all of it to tape.

In your case where you have only one disk, where a directory is
serving as holdingdisk area, this is only of marginal value in data
protection :-)

I know, this won't be the best archiving system in the world, but it will do. :)

Maybe a simpler script that writes a simple header, and does gnutar
of the files/dirs you want, will do just as well, at least if you can
make sure you append to the tape, instead of overwriting it.


--
Paul Bijnens, Xplanation                            Tel  +32 16 397.511
Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUM    Fax  +32 16 397.512
http://www.xplanation.com/          email:  Paul.Bijnens AT xplanation DOT com
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