On Mon, May 08, 2006 at 07:16:54AM -0400, Scott R. Burns wrote:
> I am considering changing my current setup from device names to mount point
> names. I have a "Daily" config and a "Monthly" config which forces full
> dumps which are never overwritten and stored offsite. My question is WRT
> index/restore issues if I change my disklist now. I have 25 tapes in my
> Daily rotation, will I have problems restoring if I change from say: "sd0f"
> to "/data4". Does this come into play in index lookup for amrecover?
> 

Absolutely. ---  WAIT, now I'm not so sure.
I wrote that first word and then decided to do some emperical testing.

If I remove, by renaming, a DLE in the disklist file, amrecover presents
the old name and the new name with the 'disklist' command.  If the disk
is set to the new name it reports "no index records", if set to the old
name, it still uses the old indexes to present the backups - even though
that disk name is no longer in the disklist file.

If I change the index directory name to match the new disk name, I am
not able to use the new name for recover (still no index files despite
the directory name change) and now the old name also reports no index
files (slightly different error message).

My take on this is that amrecover knows about DLE's from the disklist OR 
the log files.  The indexes don't matter here.  Whether you can scan the
index and extract files depends on depends on the log files AND the indexes,
the disklist doesn't matter here.

So I would say yes, you can change the name in the disklist and still
recover from old dumps using the old, not the new, name.  But remember,
I say that from quick emperical testing.

Two additional points to consider:

when you change the name, amanda will consider it a "new disk" and will
have to immediately do a level 0 dump.  If you change a lot of names at
once you will have a huge amdump run and be way out of balance for a
while.

you probably have been using the 3 part format (eg. host sd0f dumptype)
for your DLE.  Had you used the 4 part format, the disk name could be
an arbitrary string and you could change the device name without worrying
about the recovery.  For example, "host DATA4 sd0f dumptype" would become
"host DATA4 /data4 dumptype".  It still would be "host:DATA4" to amanda.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)