On Tue, Sep 06, 2005 at 05:42:22PM +0100, Rodrigo Ventura wrote:
> 
> That's an interesting configuration. I think I'll adopt something like
> that here. The only problem is that someone (i.e., me) will have to
> change the magazine at the right times. Hum, since each magazine has 6
> slots, can't use one per day, unless I skip a day, maybe sunday. I

That is what I do.

But do you really mean Sunday?  At what time of the day do you do
your backups?  In my case I do them at about 2AM.  So what some call
the "Sunday" backup is actually done on Monday.

I do skip Sunday.  Saturday morning 2AM backs up Friday and Monday
2AM backs up the lower activity weekend.  Skipping Sunday means that
when I wake up on Saturday, the last tape of the magazine has been
used and the first tape of the next magazine will not be used until
2AM Monday.  I can change magazines anytime over the weekend.

> also like the swapping of cartriges, and storing one of them
> off-site. It creeps me a bit to have the servers and the backup tapes
> in the same room...

I rotate 4, one in use, the most recent one still on-site for possible
recovery needs, the second most recent off-site, and the last one
(least recent) back from off-site ready to be used next weekend.

> 
> What exactly are those archive config tapes anyway?
> 

An amanda config different from my daily config that only does level 0's
(takes most of 5 tapes) and which I only do occasionally.  Then I stick
the tapes (out of magazine) on the shelf for historical recovery if needed.
When I do an archive backup, I use that extra day over the weekend as it
takes a long time.

An example, I recall needing correspondence and data files from a machine
scrapped two years earlier.  I was able to recover them from an archive tape.

BTW my archive config is really two configs, system (/, /usr, /var, ...) and
user files (mostly home dirs).  The two configs use different disklist files
but the same tapelist, logdir, indexdir, ...


-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
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