On Friday 11 May 2007, R Ransbottom wrote:
>On Thu, May 10, 2007 at 07:08:02PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
>> On Thursday 10 May 2007, R Ransbottom wrote:
>> >The web docs suggest splitting up your vtape space
>>
>> Amanda handles vtape with the same intelligence it uses on a regular fixed
>> size tape. Amanda will promote a full backup that isn't quite due in
>> order to help maintain an approximately equal tape usage every night. In
>> fact, for those that come into the amanda arena, expecting to be able to
>> do incremental's monday-thursday, and a complete full on friday nights are
>> in for a somewhat rude shock because you have to bend over backwards, and
>> write scripts that beat her about the brow in order to achieve that hugely
>> tape wasting schedule. That simply is not in the amanda view of how
>> things work from the original conception well over a decade ago.
>
>I understood all of that; but I don't know how much intelligence Amanda
>brings to physical tapes. I have an small assortment of devices that can
>be dedicated to backups: a few DVD-RWs, a few CD-RWs, and a pair of 20gig
> DATs, Is it a good idea to have a set of tapes that encompass these various
> devices? Would Amanda burn a DVD one day and use the DAT when
>the DVD is too small?
No, that would need to be a separate configuration AFAIK. I'd use the DAT's
because the old school says tape is best, and its easily stored off-site.
But the DAT's will soon wear out, and if not equipt with changer robots are a
PITA to reload every day, and in the DDS2 size, maybe 1/50th as dependable as
I've found vtapes to be so far. It seemed there was always some hiccup in
the DAT that wound up eating my lunch 2 or 3 times a week.
Now, using vtapes on a 300GB drive and barring some stupidity on my part, like
rebooting the machine in the middle of a backup session, I can literally
forget amanda other than picking up the report from the printer and putting
it on the stack of others just like it every morning.
If I was really concerned about long term data storage, I'd burn a dual layer
dvd+r with the vtapes contents, but to do that I'd have to extend the
dumpcycle and reduce the 'tapetype' size a couple of GB to get it to fit on
the dvd. The worst part of that is that I'd have to burn at least the
dumpcycles dvd's back from todays to have a fully usable snapshot.
I also have amdump wrapped up in a script that somewhat resembles the
GenesAmandaHelper-0.5.tar.gz you can get from the zmanda site, the local copy
is up to 0.6, but not 'pretty enough' just yet plus its a blabbermouth. This
tars up the configs and indice directories and appends them to the (v)tape,
thereby removing the "recovery data is always a day out of date with the data
on that media" problem. To recover, just use mt to move to the start of
those two files with the fsf command, pull them off with dd, run them thru a
session of tar xzf, put them back where they came from even on a new bare
drive, do the same with the /home tarball which contains the build of amanda,
ready to reinstall, and you should then be equipt to use amanda's restore and
recovery tools to rebuild a bare drive with only a very minimal install on
it, literally nothing more than mt, dd, tar, and gzip.
This also removes another problem for long term storage, amanda recycles the
space the indices uses when recycling a tape. With that data on the long
term storage media, its recoverable and ALL of amanda tools should work once
the file with the /home tree in it has been recovered, at which point you can
even step into the /home/amanda/amanda-2.x.x-snapshot-date directory, type:
make install;ldconfig;su amanda -c "amcheck Daily", and the exact same amanda
that made the backups will be installed and ready to use for the recovery.
But as just an old fart (72) geek who might not wake up tomorrow morning, my
data isn't that precious, so I suffice to do a burn of the /root, /home,
and /etc trees from time to time, which if I do some housecleaning
beforehand, should fit on that dual layer dvd+r. The music and pix will fit
on 2 more of them.
>Thanks.
>
>Be well,
You too.
>rir
--
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
For God's sake, stop researching for a while and begin to think!
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