Sorry for the html post. I didn't know.


> The only thing that bothers me about what you posted is the tapes
> name.  It seems to imply that its the only tape you have, and thats
> not a workable solution unless your dumpcycle is 0, forcing a full of
> everything on every run.  I don't really think thats what you wanted.

Best regards,
ddaas

Gene Heskett wrote:

On Friday 25 February 2005 10:01, ddaasd wrote:

First, Please do not post in html. Many of us do not automaticly decode html because of the security aspects. Set your mail agent to text only.

Hello,
I am not very confident with amanda report.
Can anyone explain me what mean the following:
1. planner: Incremental of server:/home/samba/pub bumped to level 2.
2.  planner: Full dump of server:/var/lib promoted from 6 days
ahead.
3. planner: Last full dump of server:/src on tape MyDaily
overwritten in 2 runs.
I am not sure what bumped to level 2, promoted from 6 days ahead and
overwritten in 2 runs mean.
Also I would like to know, how Amanda chooses when to make a full
backup or an incremental one.

The above is strictly advisory on the part of amanda, its adjusting the schedule with an eye toward equalizing the amount of media used on each run. Amanda will, particularly for the first few tapecycle's worth of runs, actively move the level 0 and incrementals around within the dumpcycle time period as amanda tries to accomplish this. The only thing that will disturb this is if you actually have more data to backup than you have tape capacity available to do in the allotted dumpcycle days. In forceing the issue here, I have never, ever seen amanda put off a level 0 that was due by more than 2 days. The fact that it has to do that is evidence that your dumpcycle is too short for the amount of data, or you just started and the disklist wasn't commented such that approximately a tapes full of new dle's are done each night until the whole list is exposed.

You can also help amanda in the balanceing dept by using many small dle entries as opposed to just one big / entry, as this gives amanda a much more fine grained view of the system. Doing 2 machines here, I have about 50 dle's specified, and the media usage is about 87% every night, and no one dle exceeds 4GB, with many under 200 megs. You'll have to use tar, not dump, in order to do that. Each has its own set of warts of course, but in the long run most of us have come into the tar camp. There are version problems with tar, so make sure its one of 1.13-19, 1.13-25, or 1.15-1. 1.13 (no suffix) in particular is badly borked. I've been using 1.15-1 here for about a month, and so far there have been no 'glitches'.

Amanda's general view of how to do it means that the level 0's are scattered among the last dumpcycle's used tapes, so that at any one time, a full, neary bare metal recovery is the last 'dumpcycle's worth of tapes. Call it a set if you'd like. There is no concept of a full on this tape, and the incrementals on the next x tapes as thats extremely wastefull of the tape media.

Similarly, you can get a pretty good idea of whats compressable, and what isn't by setting the individual dle's to a compressing made, then inpecting your emails for the compression achieved when processing that dle. Those dle's that only compress to 85% would be good ones to switch the dumptype on so that the system doesn't waste a lot of time trying to squeeze the last byte out of a file thats not compressible. A whole dir full of tar.gz or .bz2's? Forget it, they aren't going to compress near enough to make the cpu spinning worth the effort. OTOH, I have a couple of dle's that happily conpress to less than 10% of their uncompressed size.

You'll soon get the feel for amanda I think, and amanda IS looking out for your best interests. Use the emails you get to do some judicious fine tuning here and there and in a little while it will be marching along smoothly with your only job being to keep amanda supplied with usable media for the next run.

The only thing that bothers me about what you posted is the tapes name. It seems to imply that its the only tape you have, and thats not a workable solution unless your dumpcycle is 0, forcing a full of everything on every run. I don't really think thats what you wanted.

See the amanda.conf entry about tape names, and just set them as MyDaily-01 thru MyDaily-xx where xx is the number set in the 'tapecycle' entry in your amanda.conf file. Because of holidays & people forgetting to load the right tape(s), there isn't much hope for those who think they can label a tape 'Monday', and have it still being used on Monday 2 weeks down the log. The chances of that actually happening are somewhere between zilch and point oh oh oh zip. You will get our sympathies, and a couple of "I told you so's", but not much else, usually tendered with a smiley :-)