I have recently set up Amanda on a system here and am generally pleased with how it works, although the ideal setup I have in mind doesn't seem to be immediately obvious from the documentation.
I have a 160G holding disk to which I spool several 13G partitions. The tape drive is a 20G Mammoth drive, with a 10 tape stacker unit attached. I am backing up all partitions on all of the network hosts, including /, /usr and /var but obviously these don't need to be written to tape once a night - the 13G partitions contain user data and do need to be written to tape at least once a week (plus daily incrementals). I can then fit two 0-level dumps and as many incremental dumps onto one tape and stagger the 0-level dumps across my dumpcycle. These tapes would then ideally be taken offsite. The first question is how to easily stagger 0-level dumps across a dump cycle where some disks need to be backed up at different frequency to others. I initially thought that I could introduce disks to the dump cycle one after another, however this didn't work for me ... it is also likely to fail when/if there are any backup problems which need fixing ... is there an easier way to manage a backup cycle and which dumps are done when? The second question has to do with dumping streams to tape - in order to make recovery quicker, I'd like the facility to leave dumps in the holding disk area until the space they occupy is needed for more dumps ... I have enough holding disk space to hold an entire dump cycle, so leaving dumps in a near-line area would make the most sense to me ... can one dump backup streams from more than one config into the one holding area? Can one put backup streams from more than one config on the same tape? Regards, Malcolm -- Malcolm Herbert This brain intentionally [EMAIL PROTECTED] left blank
