>... For instance, I'd like to backup servers A & B on
>the same tape every thursday, server C every tuesday, and server D on
>Mondays, wednesdays and fridays.
>
>Can AMANDA handle this from one config, or does it require 3 separate
>configs and crafty cron manipulation?
For a given configuration, Amanda will (try to) back up everything listed
in the disklist every time it is run. So you'll either need multiple
configurations to do this, or you could do some clever multiple disklist
file manipulation.
Or, you could split the servers with multiple dumptypes and use "ignore
yes" to skip the ones you don't want to do on a given day. I'd probably
do it by putting the special dumptypes in a set of separate files and
symlinking the appropriate one for a given day to a fixed name, then
using "includefile" in amanda.conf to bring that in. E.g.:
From (e.g.) cron:
rm server-dumptypes
ln -s server-dumptypes.`date +%a` server-dumptypes
In amanda.conf:
includefile "server-dumptypes"
Is there some special reason you don't want to do backups of everything
every day?
Now, as to your "backup servers A & B on the same tape ..." comment,
that's going to be a lot harder. Amanda uses tapes in a simple least
recently used fashion. If your tape drive has a bad day :-) and you
need to use amflush to write the remainder of a run, that will go to
the next tape and throw off your sequence.
But the real question is, why do you want to use the same tape every week?
My guess would be "so I know which tape to grab" to do a restore. And my
answer to that would be one of two things. Either keep enough Amanda
information around (hard copy, E-mail, alternate server copies, etc)
so you can ask Amanda which tape to use (this is the approach I use),
or maybe go outside of Amanda to do periodic full dumps to specific
tapes and let Amanda do the incrementals in between.
One of the hardest things administrators who have backup experience find
with Amanda is letting go of previous ideas of how things should be done
(it certainly took me a while to get used to it :-). Believe me when I
tell you that letting Amanda deal with **all** of the scheduling and not
trying to warp it into what I thought was "the right way" was a really
good thing. In general Amanda does a good job. Let it.
>Matt Barringer
John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
