> Hi, Bret,
>
> on Dienstag, 18. Mai 2004 at 07:37 you wrote to amanda-users:
>
> BM> I a couple servers and about a dozen PCs to backup.
> Based upon my
> BM> current backup, it seems that only a few GB changes every day.
I
> BM> have a 20 tape DLT 80 autochanger, which should back
> everything up
> BM> for a long time. My tape machine also has "plenty" of
> holding disk
> BM> space (something like 3 tapes worth/120 GB). The servers
> have quite
> BM> a bit of disk space on them, but the vast majority of it never
> BM> changes (1 server has maybe 100 GB total space that needs to be
> BM> backed up, but 80 GB of it is basically static).
>
> BM> My configuration is therefore one which will waste a lot
> of tape if
> BM> I let Amanda write a tape every night (and more
> importantly, it will
> BM> run out of tapes and pester me in 3 weeks instead of 6
months...)
>
> You want to run backups for 6 months with 20 tapes?
> Tell us more about that, this is not clear to me ...
I have 20x40 GB = 800 GB, and I generate about 5GB/day of backup
traffic, which is something like 160 days if I can optimally fill the
tapes. I know I can't but I'd like to try and get close. Right now
I'm just backing up the server (which has most of the data) with cpio
to what will become the holding disk, doing only level 1 backups (a
restore is always only 2 steps) and I get a few months before I have
to do another archive and start over, keeping something like 30 days
worth of level 1s. Eventually the level 1s get too big and so I start
over.
My real goal here is to set something up that minimizes the amount of
attention it takes for me to make it work. I'd just stick with what I
have, except that there are new a few PCs that I need to start backing
up as well.
>
> BM> Inspired by what I think that is telling me, I would like
> to do is
> BM> something like this:
>
> BM> - Run compressed backups to the holding disk
> BM> - while the holding disk has > 1 tape worth of data (40
> GB), write a
> BM> tape.
>
> BM> It isn't clear to me how to set it up to get this behavior.
>
> If you really want to fill your tapes, you could set up
> vtapes (look into the HOWTO-FILE-DRIVER in the docs) that are
> nearly as big as your DLTs, and save the vtape-dirs with a
> second config to your DLTs.
This sounds promising, but again I want to only write to the tape when
there is enough data to fill it, and I'm not sure how to set up that
config. I'll read the vtape documents and see what I can learn.
I suppose I can not put amanda into cron, and have a cron job that
sees how full the vtape disk is, and when it is full enough it could
kick off a backup.
>
> I think you should just take the straight way, setup your
> changer, configure a dumptype for your nearly-static stuff
> that has a long dumpcycle and start going.
>
> If you leave the tapes out, AMANDA will fill your
> holdingdisk, modify the "reserve"-parameter to even get
> lev0-dumps in there.
I don't understand the last paragraph.
Thanks again for the help,
Bret
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