Re: breaking up harddrives for gtar

On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 03:37:14PM -0700, Mike Fedyk wrote:
> Jon LaBadie wrote:
> >On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 04:57:42PM -0400, Jason Castonguay wrote:
> > 
> >>This has been working pretty well, but I read somewhere that one can get 
> >>even better results by breaking things up to as many small directories as 
> >>one can. This makes sense to me, as it will allow amanda to schedule 
> >
> >I do it with a set of disk list entries all with the same
> >starting directory but different uniq "tag" names.  In most
> >I use the include directive (or include append) to list the
> >subdirectory or directories I want backed up by that DLE.
> >In one final DLE starting from the same directory I use the
> >exclude append directive to eliminate all the subdirs backed
> >up by the earlier mentioned DLEs.  This serves as a catchall
> >for any dirs not specifically backed up by its own DLE.
> >
> Can you give an example of this?
> 
> You have multiple entries in your disklist something like so?
> 
> hostfoo /parent  comp-tar-master
> hostfoo /parent/a  comp-tar-child
> hostfoo /parent/b  comp-tar-child
> 
> And comp-tar-master excludes /parent/a and /parent/b?
> 
> Otherwise, doesn't Amanda keep you from doing this?
> 
> hostfoo /parent  comp-tar-master
> hostfoo /parent  comp-tar-child-a
> hostfoo /parent  comp-tar-child-b
> 
> which is the same as the previous except comp-tar-child-a includes 
> /parent/a and comp-tar-child-b that includes /parent/b
> 
> Doesn't Amanda prevent you from several DLEs with the same path 
> ("/parent" in this case)?



>From the amanda(8) man page:

     The disklist file determines which disks will be  backed  up
     by Amanda.  The file usually contains one line per disk:

          hostname diskname [ diskdevice ] dumptype [  spindle  [
          interface ] ]

     All pair [ hostname diskname ] must be unique.

By not reading the man page before posting, I refered to the
diskname as a "tag".  If both diskname and diskdevice are
present, the second is the more traditional "starting dir"
and can appear multiple times.  If only one is present,
it is both the diskdevice and diskname.

Thus, a revision of your sample disklist

  hostfoo ParentCatchall /parent  comp-tar-master
  hostfoo ParentBigDir1  /parent  comp-tar-child-a
  hostfoo ParentBigDir2  /parent  comp-tar-child-b

would be valid and each dumptype could have different specs
which would allow different includes/excludes.

The diskname is used in amanda reports.  I'm not certain,
but it might be possible to use slashes in the name and
thus the above list might be valid this way too, but I'm
not 100% certain.

  hostfoo /parent          /parent  comp-tar-master
  hostfoo /parent/BigDir1  /parent  comp-tar-child-a
  hostfoo /parent/BigDir2  /parent  comp-tar-child-b

However, I make use of an alternate form of the DLE whereby
you can customize each DLE individually.

  hostfoo ParentBigDir1  /parent  {
        comp-tar
        include ./BigDir1
  }
  hostfoo ParentBigDir2  /parent  {
        comp-tar
        include ./BigDir2
  }
  hostfoo ParentCatchall /parent  {
        comp-tar
        exclude        ./BigDir1
        exclude append ./BigDir2
  }

I changed the order as it make more sense to me to have the
catchall last.

HTH
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
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 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)