On Monday 08 August 2005 22:33, Haroon Anwar wrote:
>Hi,
>
>I am having problem with incremental backups. Every
>thing is working
>fine. I force full backup of all my servers on
>Saturday. From Sunday
>to Friday I am taking incremental backup.
>
>It is working fine. But, what my understanding of
>incremental backup
>is, starting from level 0 backup, amanda will backup
>only those files
>which change. It should backup only the difference or
>the changes. But
>this does not seem to be happening. E.g, One of my
>server disk is 18G.
>On Saturday I backup 18G. But on Sunday, I expect
>amanda to backup
>only the difference. But, its backing up around 10G
>still and I dont
>think that the data on the server disk change that
>much. All the other
>servers are behaving in the same manner.
>
>Can someone help me how can I achieve only to backup
>the new files or
>the files that change when the incremental backup
>kicks off.
>
>I force incremental backups by putting no-full line in
>global secation
>of the dumptype and inhereting global settings in the
>other dumptypes.

Bad.  Very bad.  Awfull even..  You aren't understanding the
theory behind amandas scheduler at all.  Amanda must have a full
backup in her database within dumpcycle days history in order to be
able to discern whats changed when doing an incremental.
  
As someone else has said, you are forcing amanda to do something thats
against the way amanda is designed and expected to work.  Amanda, left
to do her own thing, will do a very good job of backing up your data
by useing her own regimen & scheduleing.  This will result in an
overall schedule that uses about the same amount of tape every night,
and you can often set runtapes to 1, depending on the size of the
drive. If you insist on bending your backups to your fixed schedule
view of how things should be done, then maybe you should look for
backup solutions other than amanda.  But I don't believe there is a
competing solution that will do incrementals only.

>Thanks
>
>Regards
>
>Haroon

I have to ask since you didn't state, is this a samba share by any
chance?  Samba, like most windows file systems, does not support ctime
and returns garbage in that field when queried.  So amanda thinks its
nearly all new and acts accordingly.

The solution to that problem here was to install amandas client stuff
on the targeted box and change the disklist entry from a /mnt/x/y path
to a 'FQDN       /path  dumptype        spindle_number  leo' style of
entry.  Everything I do here is on this side of the firewall so thats
not a problem.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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Copyright 2005 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.