A quick drive around the block to return some rental videos may have brought
a little more clarity of thinking, but maybe not...
After digging into the logs and using amverify on the tapes used, I can see
that I am getting a couple of level 0 backups and a single level 1 on the
second tape. This is not really what I wanted so let's try this from a
slightly different stand point; the requirements of the situation due to
historical procedures.
Historically we have done full backups of the Unix/Linux based machines over
the weekend as that is the time that they are at their lowest usage and it
enables us to gather the full backup tapes for offsite storage Monday for
pickup on Tuesday. The rest of the week should have been incremental
backups, but my predecessor chose to also do them all as full backups. I
intend with Amanda to move the Mon-Thurs backups back to Incrementals. All
of the current backups are currently being done across three DDS2 tape
drives across three machines and exceed the capacity of the tapes. To remedy
this we purchased a refurbished Qualstar Library with 20 tape slots and a
single AIT1 tape drive with approximately 25Gb of storage per tape. The
amount of data stored across the Unix/Linux machines is fairly large, but
it's rate of change is relatively small.
If what I am reading is correct, to do this the way that best fits our
offsite tape storage, I need the following:
1) One configuration that does just full backups starting on Friday and
running to completion.
2) One configuration that does nothing but incrementals Sunday or
Monday-Thursday. Theory being, that the amount of change will be small
enough to fit on 1-2 tapes per night.
If I divide the tape slots down the middle with 10 slots being given to the
full backup configuration and 10 slots being given to the incremental, how
should the dumpcycle, runspercycle, and tapespercycle be setup for each one?
My first guess would be:
For full Backup Configuration:
dumpcycle 0
runspercycle 4
tapespercycle 10
For Incremental Configuration:
dumpcycle 4 (or 5 if I run on Sunday also)
runspercycle 4
tapespercycle 2
And set a strategy incronly
The book mentions that I need to do a amadmin force on the incremental
configuration after the Full backups, but I am confused as to why?
Comments or corrections?
markh
===========================================================
Mark A. Holm - Director of Network Engineering & Operations
Inherent.com, Inc.
2140 SW Jefferson St. Phone: (503) 224-6751
Suite 200 extension 236
Portland, OR 97201 Fax: (503) 224-8872
<http://www.inherent.com> <mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
