On Fri, 28 Jan 2005, Mark Costlow wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 27, 2005 at 06:08:01PM +0100, Sebastian Ksters wrote:
> > i have a problem. For weekly backups we use Amanda with v-tapes. These tapes
> > get overwritten every week. No problems. Works fine. 
> > 
> > At Sunday we want Amanda to backup on real tapes. These tapes should not be
> > overwritten every Sunday. We want to archive the tapes. 
> 
> I have a similar situation here.  I recently moved to doing our daily dumps
> on vtapes (I previously used a 48-tape DLT jukebox).  Now periodically 
> (monthly
> maybe -- haven't set the schedule yet) I want to take a set of off-site dumps
> out of the building.
> 
> In the old tape days, I used to force a level-0 dump when I wanted to do
> that.  This was a pain and never very satisfying.  So I wrote a perl script
> that will extract the most recent full dump for every disk partition out
> of the vtapes.  It copies them to removable disks which I take offsite,
> but you could copy them to tapes instead if you wanted.  
> 
> The script is fairly generic (I tried not to let it depend on my local
> environment too much, but there may be some gotchas).  I was also lazy
> about a couple of assumptions (like the fact that my dumps all used gtar).
> If anyone wants it, let me know.

I'm interested! I wanted to ask a similar question, but never actually did.

Right now I'm backing up to vtapes (30 tapes in the cycle) on a spare
partition. Every 2 or 3 weeks I copy them to one of my two removable IDE disks.

Issues I have:
  - My tape size is much larger than the available disk size divided by 30,
    else the largest DLEs wouldn't fit. Hence sometimes a dump fails due to the
    spare  partition being full, and I end up manually deleting the oldest
    chunks on the vtapes to create more room for the next Amanda run.
    I can split up the largest DLEs in smaller parts, but I think that would
    only solve part of the problem.
  - While I have 30 days of data that Amanda knows about, I have actually more
    data on the removable disks (up to 6 weeks extra if the last copies to
    removable disk were 3 resp. 6 weeks ago). It would be nice to have some way
    to cleanly migrate the vtapes to the removable disks, and let Amanda keep
    track of all existing vtapes.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                                                Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert AT linux-m68k 
DOT org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                                            -- Linus Torvalds