Olivier Nicole wrote:
>
> >I am learning to use Amanda but it seems it has a problem, as everyone
> >knows, backing up a filesystem larger than the tape.
>
> Am I wrong? I understood that Amanda is supposed to ask for as many
> tapes during a single run, that are needed to complete the back-up.
>
> So it would start and ask for a second, third, fourth... tape until it
> managed to back-up everything.
A backup of an individual filesystem cannot span multiple tapes. For
example, if you have a 40 GB tapedrive, and you want to back up a 75 GB
disk drive that is pretty full of data that is not very compressible,
it's probably not going to work. You will have to use gnutar to split
up the disk into smaller subdirectories. Or, you might consider backing
up the disk and then repartitioning it into < 40 GB chunks.
I think that spanning multiple tapes may be a feature in some
development version of amanda, but I don't know the current status.
Secondly, "runtapes" determines the total number of tapes that amanda
will use during the run, period. You could set runtapes equal to the
number of tapes in your changer and let amanda use all of the tapes
until it is done, but that may not be the ideal strategy in the long
term. You may want to try to get amanda to use about 2-3 tapes a day,
for example, and balance the full and incremental dumps accordingly.
You have to try to be realistic about how many tapes you will need to
use, but things will also balance out some as the dump cycle progresses.
What I do is during the week, I only let amanda use 2-3 tapes for each
run. Sometimes, dumps end up left on the holding disk, and I have to
flush them to tape, but at least it keeps the backup cycle from running
into the middle of the work day if there are some large dumps that need
to get done.
For the weekend, I let amanda use all of the tapes in the rack if it
wants to. I will also deliberately force a few full dumps to try to get
them done on the weekend so they won't run during the week. One thing I
haven't worked out yet is a good system for trying to guess what full
dumps should be coming due soon so I can specifically force those dumps
on the weekend.
--
"Jonathan F. Dill" ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
CARB Systems and Network Administrator
Home Page: http://www.umbi.umd.edu/~dill
