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Re: how to recover the whole month backups
2007-12-05 13:53:56
zuki (a.k.a. fedora?) wrote:
hoogendyk wrote:
There are a number of issues here that are hard to answer without
more information about your setup, volume of data and budget. These
are things that every backup administrator has to answer, and there
is no particular "right" answer.
<snip>
So, you filled(?) your 30 days of tapes, and now you want to put that
somewhere before you begin to fill another 30 days worth. How much
data is that? And where did you figure on storing it? If you are
using tapes in the first place, it seems fair to assume you don't
have that much excess disk space sitting around. If you want it all,
then you could just keep adding new tapes to your cycle. If you are
not filling the tapes, you could use a holding disk, configure Amanda
so that it would do both fulls and incrementals to the holding disk,
and then only put a tape in when the holding disk was approaching
full. Amanda would automatically flush it all out to tape on the next
run (on the other runs you'd get tape errors, but it would do the
backups to the holding disk). If your data capacity allowed you to
put a tape in only once a week, then 52 tapes would run your backups
for a year.
Yes. my tapes are 30 tapes and I want to put that somewhere before I
begin to fill another 30 days worth. The data is around 300GB and I
want to restore it in same HDD just take them out from tapes. I am not
using tape but using HDD (tapeless).
You could also set up a separate archive configuration for Amanda,
schedule it to run once a month, and make sure the schedule doesn't
interfere with the normal daily runs. I prefer to have all the book
keeping and indexes in one configuration, but you may have other
priorities.
May I know how to setup a separate archive for Amanda? I will have to
try it.
There are a multitude of possible ways to configure backups with
Amanda. You should have enough information from running Amanda up to
this point to see how much data you have to backup and how well your
tape capacity, server, and network handle that. Then you put that
together with your budget and decide what is going to work for you
for a long term strategy.
One point I would make, though, is that recovering from backup in
order to make an archive is probably not a good strategy. You would
need a large enough capacity disk to handle the recovery, and you
would lose the client machine information in the process, since the
archive backup would only know that it came from your recovery disk.
Hopefully, my comments along with Jon's will help you decide how to
configure your long term strategy.
I am using 1TB HDD (RAID 5 LVM). I will need to add more HDD if I want
to restore in the same machine. That is my planing for now. I am a
newbie for Amanda. If u guys have a better solutions for me I would be
appreciate it. Thanks a lot for your meaningful explanations. :-)
Ahh, so you have a 1TB RAID on which you have set up 30 virtual tapes,
and those 30 tapes occupy 300GB after running for 30 days. You could add
more virtual tapes as suggested by Jean-Louis, however, at 300GB/month
you are going to run out of space sometime after 3 months. You're also
putting all your eggs in one RAID, to twist a phrase. If that were a
server class RAID built with server class SCSI drives, I might trust it;
but, if it is cheap hardware SATA type stuff, I've heard more than a few
horror stories of multiple drive failures leading to data loss.
So you have a couple of issues. You should think about redundancy and
how well you are covering yourself. This is strongly influenced by your
budget, but at least consider having a hot spare configured in your
RAID. And, be sure to keep an eye on things. Watch log files. Perhaps
implement some automated checking and notification of hardware errors.
That's one reason I like real tapes -- the possibilities for
catastrophic data loss are almost nil.
Your other issue is bringing your storage capacity and your backup
policies into line with one another. You indicate you want coverage for
a year. Using your current configuration and expanding the number of
virtual tapes will have you running out of storage capacity in just over
3 months. Your daily needs aren't that big. I don't know what your
configuration is (dump cycle, runs per cycle, etc.), but adjusting those
probably wouldn't help enough, since you need 3 or 4 times as much
storage capacity. However, since your daily backups are not too big, you
could perhaps once a month force all your DLEs to full and then mark
that tape as no-reuse. At the end of some period, you'll have a bunch of
full backups marked no-reuse and a full cycle of vtapes that just keep
getting turned over (maybe a 6 week cycle?). You will have to determine
what fits into your storage capacity. Then you could just remove the
no-reuse tag for the oldest and let it go back into the cycle. At that
point you are in a pattern of each month or so forcing a full, marking
it no-reuse, and releasing the oldest no-reuse to go back into the
cycle. Your cycle would be totally automated by Amanda, but your forced
fulls would be manual (though you could script it). That's just one
possibility.
I wouldn't get into multiple configurations until you are really
comfortable with it. Otherwise, it could make things too complicated as
well as less efficient for your storage capacity. Better to have all
your backups and indexes under one configuration. Amanda can continue to
plan incrementals based on the no-reuse fulls since they are part of the
same configuration. But that's just my opinion for your situation at
this point in time.
---------------
Chris Hoogendyk
-
O__ ---- Systems Administrator
c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments
(*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst
<hoogendyk AT bio.umass DOT edu>
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Erdös 4
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