Good morning,

during the last weekend we had a major security breach
that we were able to fix (forunately), but that showed
additional flaws in our desaster recovery mechanisms.

We have been relying on Amanda for mor than ten years.
This is not going to be a complaint about Amanda's features.
The software has proven extremely reliable over time.
I'm going to tell what could be improved for our particular
needs and I am asking for suggestions for a different setup,
additional software, whatever ... just ideas.

OK, we used Amanda with tape drives and now with ever
increasing number of hosts, we switched to disk based
(vtape) storage about a year ago.

Routine restore of directory bla on host foo on date
bar is perfectly OK. We are backing up 53 hosts with
161 DLEs. The nightly run takes about 10 hours.
Most connections are 100 Mbit/s.
The Amanda server is a single Intel storage system
with about 4 TB of RAID5 storage space divided into
20 vtapes of 200 GB each.

After the incident we had four servers that were in for
a complete restore. We switched off the compromised machines
and set up the applications on completely new systems.

That meant 100GB+ to simply extract from the archives.
We ran amrecover on the Amanda server host in a temporary
directory, then transferred the data to the new systems.

Unfortunately amrecover cannot run multiple instances in
parallel? That meant operator supervised restore, using
amtape to change vtapes, ... for a couple of hours.

Currently I'm waiting for the nightly backup to finish so
I can restore another system that had lower priority,
since amrecover cannot run in parallel with amdump, either.

So how can I improve the situation? Would setting up
amrecover capability on the clients enable me to restore
multiple clients at the same time?

Wishlist: multiple amrecover sessions, automatic selection
of appropriate vtape during restore. Are there any plans
in this direction? I know that with the increasing number
of people using disks for backup, some API changes for
the "tape" interface are on their way.

How do you plan for "I need to restore a couple of systems
at once on bare hardware with just fresh OS installed"?

Any suggestions and lively discussion welcome.

Thanks,

Patrick M. Hausen
Leiter Netzwerke und Sicherheit
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