1. AMANDA will support multiple daily runs going to the same tape, by
holding them all on disk until you are ready to flush them to tape. This is
not recommended. The risk of a tape failing while holding several days'
worth of backup is high enough that buying more tapes, whenever possible, is
preferred.
2. Doing a full backup without a schedule is easy once your basic AMANDA
configuration is working. A separate configuration can be used for archival
backups of some or all of your systems, and can be run manually as needed.
(I have such a configuration in addition to my two automated configurations.
I use it for taking a snapshot backup before making major changes.)
3. Clients need the AMANDA client, inetd or something similar to start the
client, and a backup program (tar, dump, vfsdump). Clients that backup SMB
shares will also need the SAMBA client. The server will need the AMANDA
server, AMANDA client (so it can back itself up), cron or something similar
to schedule backups, and tape changer control software (if you have a tape
changer.) I might have missed something, but I think that's most of it.
4. Backups via SAMBA really do work, with some caveats: (a) Don't try to
back up the registry directly; (b) Don't use share names with characters
other than numbers and letters in them; (c) Don't expect to backup open
files correctly (this includes applications AND data).
-----Original Message-----
From: Peter Matulis [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]]
Sent: Tuesday, June 05, 2001 1:14 PM
To: Amanda-Users (E-mail)
Subject: Investigating Amanda
Hi,
First post. Here are my initial questions with using Amanda:
Is it possible to use the same tape for multiple (daily) runs? How?
Is it possible to simply do full backups (full dumps) manually? Without any
schedule? How?
Do I need to run any other software/daemons on the server and/or client for
network-wide backups to occur?
Does using Samba (smbmount) to back up Windows clients really work?
Thank you and I hope to receive advice from those in the trenches.
Peter Matulis
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
