On Tuesday 18 January 2005 11:13, Dwight Tovey wrote:
>I used to work on a system that used Legato NSR as the
> backup/restore solution.  In order to make life a little simpler in
> case of catastrophic failure, I used to periodically take a tar
> image of the nsr configuration and index files.  This way when I
> needed to do a full restore of the disk that held these files I
> could just restore that tape first and nsr would then be able to
> handle everything else without having to re-index all the regular
> tapes.  Saved my butt more than once.
>
>Do people do anything similar with Amanda?
>
Yes, I'm doing that here, brought on by the apparent lack of being 
able to backup any file that amanda otherwise has a lock on.

>If that is a reasonable thing to do, what are the minimum required
> files that should be saved?

I have a seperate subdir that I don't backup with amanda, that has the 
images of all the amanda configs and indices it generates.  These are 
generated after the amdump itself is completed, and then appended to 
the existing tape, so that I can go to the eod of the tape, back up 
two files, recover those with a simple dd to tar operation, and have 
an environment re-established that exactly matches the one that 
generated the rest of the tape.   Should I ever be so unlucky as to 
have to do a bare metal recovery to a new drive, I feel that I could 
get everything back in just a few hours.

My scripts are terminally messy, having been developed over a period 
of years and two different backup mediums (I'm using a big hard drive 
and virtual tapes now, which allowed me to comment out a lot of tape 
related stuff but its still there) but they work for me.  Unforch, 
they are also hard coded, so while I'm not to bashfull to fwd them to 
someone, they aren't going to work until they are made to fit your 
environment.  That shouldn't be too difficult if you're familiar with 
bash stuff.

As they exist, they do the housekeeping of deleting out of date stuffs 
as the tapes get reused, rendering the older settings moot.  Amanda 
does that, so I figured I might as well too.

If you are interested, I can tarball them up & email privately if you 
take private email, I find I'm getting bounces from entirely too many 
these days.

>Thanks
>
>    /dwight

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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