Jon LaBadie wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 25, 2007 at 12:43:50PM -0400, Chris Hoogendyk wrote:
> ...
>   
>> then I created a dumptype that was the same as my regular dumps but with
>>
>> record no
>> strategy incronly
>>
>> I thought this would work, because the incremental would be based on
>> ufsdump, and it would know there had been a full, even though it was a
>> different configuration.
>>
>> Apparently, I've got this wrong. I'll check through the documentation,
>> but I thought someone on the list might have done something like this or
>> know either that it can't be done or how to do it as well as why.
>> (Possibly, amanda interprets incronly as "iff there has already been a
>> full at some time under this configuration.")
>>     
>
> ufsdump might have been able to figure out from which date to do the
> incremental, `IF' it had been asked to do an incremental.
>
> However, as this was a new config, amanda "knew" there had never been
> a level 0 for this config.  And of course it must start from a level 0
> to do the incrementals.  Even on a config meant to do incronly strategy
> you must do an initial full dump.

That's sort of what I was guessing with my parenthetical "iff" statement.

So, I could feed in DLE's one at a time until they had all done a full
(kind of begging the question that some of the individual DLE's would be
too large for the 14G partition). But, then, with a tapecycle of 2,
would amanda not also "smartly" conclude that the configuration no
longer had a full backup for DLEs x,y and z? For which it would then
request a full backup? Which would make it impossible for me to just let
the fulls cycle off until the configuration became an incremental only
configuration.

And that kind of brings up the question, why "incronly"? Under what
circumstances would someone find this useful? And how would they use it?

And, how is it possible to do what I want to do, which is run weekend
incrementals without using additional tapes or taking down my tape
library? I'm perfectly willing to have them not be recorded and then
have the Monday backups catch up using the typical amanda strategy. I
would only use the weekend configuration for recovery if someone called
me before the following weekend, at which point they would get overwritten.

There seems to be some confusion in the amanda man pages & documentation.

The man page for amanda.conf.5 says:

/incronly/

    Only do incremental dumps. *amadmin force* should be used to tell
    /Amanda/ that a full dump has been performed off-line, so that it
    resets to level 1. It is similar to skip-full, but with incronly
    full dumps may be scheduled manually. Unfortunately, it appears that
    /Amanda/ will perform full backups with this configuration, which is
    probably a bug.

But the man page for amadmin.8 says:

     force [ hostname [ disks ]* ]+
         Force the disks on hostname to do a full (level 0)
         backup during the next Amanda run.

which actually makes more sense for "force", although I would like to be
able to tell amanda that there was a full backup done offline.

I can afford to experiment for a while, since my primary backup sequence
is working; but, at this point, I'm not sure where to go with it. Trying
to fake out amanda by editing its database seems rather chancy.

Is there something somewhere that I'm completely missing?


---------------

Chris Hoogendyk

-
   O__  ---- Systems Administrator
  c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments
 (*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst 

<hoogendyk AT bio.umass DOT edu>

--------------- 

Erdös 4