On 2006-06-13 15:35, Joshua Baker-LePain wrote:

Again, let the curmudgeon step in here. One of the initial design principles of amanda was the ability to get your data off the tapes with *no* amanda tools -- mt, dd, and tar or restore were all that was needed. Tape spanning as implemented has already broken that, requiring amfetchdump to reassemble spanned DLEs...

I think. I honestly don't know how badly the principle has been broken. Can one simply cat the 2 (or more) spanned images together (minus some header info perhaps) and get the whole image back?

http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Restoring_files#Using_amrestore_with_split_dumps

In that explanation I used amrestore to fetch the chunks from disk to
tape, but doing it with a shell script is still doable:
- read the first 32K block of the tape chunk
- get the first line and decide if this is the a chunk you need
  (we can still keep the requirement that chunks should have been
  written monotonously, but they can be interspersed with other chunks)
- if not, just skip to the next tape chunk
- if yes, save the rest of the tape chunk to disk
- output that chunk to stdout when reading the next chunk header and
  that has a different number (because incomplete blocks are rewritten
  in the beginning of the next tape).

When I find some more time, I'll test that method, and add it to the
webpage.

Amrestore does not need any database, or amanda.conf file at all, so
is not too dependent on Amanda things only.

The recommended way is to backup the DLE's that contains Amanda related
files with the KISS principle (no splitting, maybe not even gzipping!)

But I agree.  I like to Keep It Simple too.

In general Backup Programs should make it easy to restore. That's even
more important than easy to backup.



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