Thanks Jon!

Your reply was very helpful indeed, especially on point number 2!

I do appreciate it.

Regards,

Joe


Jon LaBadie wrote:
> 
> On Fri, Jun 30, 2006 at 03:40:50AM -0700, Joe Donner (sent by Nabble.com)
> wrote:
>> 
>> Dear all,
>> 
>> I think I may finally have cracked Amanda, but there are two things not
>> quite clear to me:
>> 
>> 1.  When you do an amrecover, do you HAVE to rewind the tape first?  This
>> isn't a problem as such, I'm just wondering whether or not it should work
> 
> I believe that amanda expects the tape used for recovery to be at the
> start of the tape when you type "y" to continue.
> 
>> that way, i.e. in amanda.conf I've got specified tapedev "/dev/nst0",
>> which
>> I understand to mean that you're using your tape drive as a no-rewind
>> device
>> (which I believe is sort of required by Amanda).
> 
> Typically amanda rewinds the tape when it wants the tape at the beginning.
> The above amrecover scenario may be an exception.
> 
> The use of the no-rewind device is particularly important during tape
> writing.  Suppose amanda checks the tape label to see which tape is
> in the drive, finds it is the correct tape, then closes the tape device.
> If the tape auto-rewound on close, then when amanda started to write a
> DLE, it would overwrite the tape label.
> 
>> 2.  I create a restore directory on the Amanda server, and then run
>> amrecover as root from that directory to test doing restores from tape. 
>> At
>> the moment I'm backing up directories from two hosts - the backup server
>> itself and a client linux machine.  I've noticed that when I restore
>> stuff
>> into the restore directory for one client, and subsequently do a restore
>> to
>> the same directory for a second client, then the first client's restored
>> files get deleted just before the second client's files are restored.  In
>> other words, the restore directory is cleared of all its contents, and
>> then
>> the second restore runs.  Is this intended behaviour?
>> 
>> I would think that in practice you'd set up your clients so that you
>> could
>> restore data straight back to the client into a temporary directory, as
>> opposed to doing restores to the backup server and then copying the data
>> back to the client.
> 
> What many mis-understand is that amrecover tries to get the directory
> structure back to the state that existed at the date you specify for
> the recovery (setdate).  This doesn't mean just get the files that
> were there then, but eliminate those that were not there.  So when
> you tried to recover a second, totally different client/DLE to the
> same directory, it found things from the first client/DLE that did
> not exist on the second client/DLE and it eliminated them.  Recovering
> each to its own separate empty directory is the way to go.
> 
> When you recover directly to the original source tree, if you have
> specified and set a date for a week ago, then you are going to be
> eliminating those things created/modified since that date.
> 
> 
> -- 
> 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)
> 
> 

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