On Sun, Aug 20, 2006 at 01:23:55PM -0400, Jon LaBadie wrote:
> On Sun, Aug 20, 2006 at 01:28:29PM +0100, Chris Lee wrote:
> > I was wondering if anyone thought it would be a good idea for Amanda to
> > write a footer file to tape after completing a dump providing a record
> > of the tapes needed to produce a full restore to the state the system
> > was in when this tape was written.
> > I don't use amanda in a way that this would be very useful to me, it is
> > only for home backups and I have a dumpcycle of 2 so I just need the
> > last 3 tapes and I am sure to have all I need. However I was thinking in
> > situations where longer dumpcycles and lots of DLEs are common it could
> > help with restores if you lose Amanda and her data.
> > The footer file would just be a list of the tapes from the last level 0
> > to now for each DLE.
> >
> > For example a file formatted like this, so anyone can read it without
> > Amanda's help:
> > /home/bob { //Tapes needed for this DLE
> > DailySet3 0 Thursday 17/08/2006
> > DailySet4 1 Friday 18/08/2006
> > DailySet5 2 Monday 21/08/2006
> > }
> > /home/anne { //Tapes Needed for this DLE
> > DailySet5 0 Monday 21/08/2006
> > }
> > etc.
> >
> > Restore Set { //list of all tapes needed for all DLEs
> > DailySet3 Thursday 17/08/2006
> > DailySet4 Friday 18/08/2006
> > DailySet5 Monday 21/08/2006
> > }
> >
>
> Interesting idea. A 32KB trailer file is, I believe, already added
> to the last tape used in a dump. I'm not sure I like the idea of
> adding this data, either as a last file before the trailer, or as
> part of the trailer. In a large installation it could get quite
> large and could result in an extra tape being used if the last
> DLE nearly filled the tape.
>
> But as a separately executed report, I really like it.
> Things not included in your format are the client and the
> tape file number. With tape spanning that could be 'tapes'
> and tape file 'numbers' for a single dump level.
>
> Can Josef Wolf's amandatape program be massaged into such a format?
AFAICS, all requested information (and more) is provided by amandatape,
it's just in a different format. Would it really make sense to tweak
the output into a special format for appending to tape? Why not writing
its ASCII output to the tape?
There's a little problem, though: amandatape does its work by parsing the
logfiles, thus the logfile must be closed to ensure proper operation.
I prefer to print this information onto the tape labels. With this I have
the information right there and don't need to search the tape in order to
find out what I need.
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