>... what if I need to completely restore a machine from
>backups? Looking at the amanda utilities, they're too big for a boot
>floppy.
One of the truly beautiful things about Amanda is that you don't
need it to do a restore. The images are self documenting and may be
recovered with only standard system tools. See "the book chapter" at
www.amanda.org. It has a section on the tape format and how to do this.
So in general, recovering a machine goes like this.
* You need the previous disk layout.
* You need a list of what tapes have the backup images you need (see
below).
* Load the OS from original media (e.g. CD) to the point you can
run commands and the disks are partitioned as needed.
* Get the restore program (e.g. GNU tar or "restore") and tape
manipulation commands ("mt" and "dd") installed. You may also
need to have the decompression program if you're compression your
dump images. These programs may come with the base OS load, or may
need a separate package.
* Restore the system areas. This may also require other OS specific
steps. For instance, on Solaris you need to run installboot to
update the boot sector (the OS load probably set things up in a
workable way, but they may not be what you were actually running if
you've done upgrades).
* Restore the non-system areas (e.g. home directories).
The list of tapes needed may be maintained several ways:
* I rdist the Amanda curinfo database after every amdump/amflush from
my tape server machine to at least one alternate that has a full
Amanda installation. With that, I can run "amadmin <config> find
<host> <disk>".
* You could run amtoc after every amdump/amflush and save those
files someplace safe.
* You could set up lbl-templ in amanda.conf to (e.g.) 3hole.ps and
save the paper copies Amanda will generate after every run.
* It's probably not a good idea to depend on Amanda backing up its
own areas. There will almost certainly be other clients/disks dumped
after Amanda dumps itself, so the database would not be complete
or consistent. There are plans in the works to handle this better.
Even if you don't have any of this, you can scan the tapes with mt/dd
and find out where things are (although that would be a last resort).
If you have space to save one thing on removable media, I'd make it
the amrestore program (and whatever shared libraries it needs, etc).
That's the basic tool used to read an Amanda tape and having it will
make your life a lot easier.
There are other tips, depending on how serious you want to get about this.
For instance, if you've kept the base OS area (/, or whatever else is
required to boot) a reasonable size, you might have Amanda always do a
full dump of that (dumpcycle 0) so you only need to reload one tape to
have that part restored. If you also include the Amanda programs in
that area, then you'll be well on your way to starting the restore.
>Ivan
John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
