On Jun 15, 2006, at 3:03 PM, Jon LaBadie wrote:

On Thu, Jun 15, 2006 at 12:33:16PM -0400, Marlin Whitaker wrote:

Sorry if this is a dumb question, but I'm new to amanda.

If I have a collection of tapes from previous amanda backups,
is there a procedure for determining which set of tapes contain
a complete backup?

I'm assuming you don't have access to the logs/indexes/amrecover.

Actually, I probably do have access to these things, but I'm not yet
sure how to interpret them. Any pointers will be appreciated. (Note
that all recent log files represent backup failures, but the old logs
are still available in the archive area.)

Here's the situation:

This machine (which happens also to be the amanda server) has not been
backed up in a while, and there have been changes to the disk usage
and to the client machines that leave me inclined to start essentially
from scratch and define a new amanda backup set.

I would like to reuse some of the existing tapes for this purpose
without destroying the last good backup, but I don't know how to tell
which ones are safe to pull out.

Thanks for your help.

-- Marlin

[end of new content]

The commonly suggested way is to try to use amrestore to extract
an "impossible" backup.  It then goes on and tells you all the
things on the tape that were not what you were looking for.  Kinda
like making a tape of contents.

Here is an example using virtual (hard disk based) tapes.  But it
would work the same (though slower) for real tapes.

    $ ammt -t file:/vt/slots rewind

    $ amrestore -p file:/vt/slots/ foobar
    amrestore:   1: skipping bigcow.ROOT-HOME.20060615.1.1
    amrestore:   2: skipping butch.WinnieF.20060615.1.1
    amrestore:   3: skipping luci.ROOT-MISC.20060615.1.1
    amrestore:   4: skipping bigcow.HOME.20060615.1.1
    amrestore:   5: skipping butch.WinnieE.20060615.1.1
    amrestore:   6: skipping bigcow.LOCAL.20060615.1.1
    amrestore:   7: skipping butch.U.20060615.1.1
    amrestore:   8: skipping luci.OPT.20060615.1.1
    amrestore:   9: skipping bigcow.OPT.20060615.1.1
    amrestore:  10: reached end of information

    $


You may also wish to consider what you, and amanda, mean
by "a complete backup".  They may not match your expectation.
A complete system backup may be spread by amanda over several
days and tapes.

--
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)

--
Marlin Whitaker
Physics OCS
(734) 764-3348