On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 11:58:55AM -0400, Ross Vandegrift wrote:
> On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 11:17:34AM -0400, Jon LaBadie wrote:
> > On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 09:53:13AM -0500, Gordon J. Mills III wrote:
> > >  here are some of my comments about TSM
> > 
> > "incremental forever" is a feature I've heard of in some other
> > backup systems.  I wouldn't expect that to fit the mold of amanda
> > as recovery would then truly demand amanda software and indexes
> > to be present.
> 
> I've been thinking about a new vtape changer that might make it easy
> to do this kind of incremental forever backup.
> 
> One issue that I run into: Most of my system have 18-20 virtual tapes.
> runtapes is 2, but I really try hard to keep things at one tape.  We
> need to kep to weeks of backups.
> 
> Suppose some event happens and someone needs to make an emergency
> backup of what's on a server, right now.  They run amdump, it clears
> the oldest tape.  If this happens too many times in a dumpcycle, oops,
> we don't have our two weeks of backups.
> 
> 
> I've been thinking about a tape changer that uses a timestamp for the
> label.  No tape is ever reused.  When amdump runs, something creates a
> new tape, labels it, and loads it.  The backup is done to this tape.

Couldn't this be done now with the autolabel feature and a V.large
tapecycle that always called for a new tape?

> 
> You then have a cronjob that runs nightly to cull old backups.  Give
> it a timeframe, it deletes any tapes that are older than the
> timeframe.
> 
> If you had a model like this, where tapes could stick around forever
> if nothing deleted them, you'd just need a flag that a given timestamp
> is a full backup and should never be thrown out.
> 
> 
> > With many people doing amanda backups
> > to vtapes, it would be nice to be able to archive desired
> > parts to "offsite" ptapes.
> 
> Shouldn't this be easy if you plan to make your vtapes the same size
> as your ptapes?

The logs+indexes might be a problem if it was going to a different config.
And I was thinking of maybe selecting what I wanted, like all level 0's of
a particular host:disk.  Or as of a specific date, one level 0 plus
incrementals up to that date.
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
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 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)