On 2006-08-21 16:45, Fabio Corazza wrote:

I'd rather go with 3 chunks each of 400GB (at least, the first two of
400GB and the third with the remaining). Or if this does not fit well
for Amanda, I can create multiple chunks of 200GB, but not less, since
this is the size of the virtual disks on the SAN, that I striped with
the volume manager.

Please bear with my curiosity (:-)): if I strictly need a BIG filesystem
to be backed up, will Amanda behave _so_ badly?

It's not so much Amanda. THe backup will probably work fine.
But (just experienced this myself in a little smaller scale :-) !!) the
restore of such data will take ages too.

According to Murphy's laws, the files to restore are usually located
at the end of that image, so reading such a gnutar image off the disk
takes about 40000 seconds, or a little bit over 11 hours :-)

"But I only need those 20 files, they are hardly 1 Mbyte each...."
Luckily the files were restored after about 1/3th of the image, but
still taking a few hours!

I will soon split that DLE up into many smaller chunks!

Now, what it mainly concerns me, are the off-site tapes.

Like you said probably the best way to go would be having two different
tape sets: 1 for incremental+fullweekly, and 1 for fullweekly to be
taken off-site.

While the first set (incremental+full) will be entirely managed by
Amanda, I'd like to schedule the off-site backup (off-site meant as the
tapes have to be taken off-site, please don't confuse) to be lasted not
over a specific day of the week.

In that day some guys in the data center will be pulling off the
off-site tapes and inserting new ones. The next week they will be
reinserting the previous tapes, etc. Basically we have two tape sets to
be rotated weekly.

What they definitely need to know is which tapes are to be pulled off.
All the tapes in the changer will have a bar code label. Can I instruct
Amanda to send an email with which tapes have been used for a determined
backup (the full weekly off-site, in this case) so that the people there
will have an idea of which tapes need to be substituted?

How about two Amanda configs "daily" and "archive", with "labelstr"
different for each of them (reg.exp. like: "Newbay-Daily[0-9]*" and
"[Newbay-Archive[0-9]*").  And then just write that label on the sticker
too, readable by a human.

Then just the tapes labeled "*Archive*" need to be pulled out...


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