Bummer! We've used amanda for more than 3 years to backup Linux, Solaris 6, 7 and 8, HP-UX 10.20 and 11.0, IRIX and IRIX64, NT4 and AIX and have had no problems with the restore proceedures from GNUTAR nor the native dump utilities. Of course, we are probably behind the curve on the amanda versions. This is welcome information since we are on the verge of replacing the server and jukebox.
A little more information would be helpful. What Linux distribution are you using? What version of amanda? Did you compile amanda yourself for your server and clients? What version of Solaris? What filesystem ext2, ufs, etc.? Wayne > Hi all, > > I don't normally post like this to any list, but recent experience (and > the pain thereof) prompted me to try and help others avoid what happened > to me. > > I've been using amanda for over a year in a production setting. It's > worked fine for the once-in-a-while single or multiple file-recovery. > But recently I had to try and do a full restore from a tape and it > failed miserably. What's worse, after inspecting the archive of tapes > that I have, not one of the dump images was complete and valid. Going > back through the amanda log files and email'd reports, I never found > errors for the tapes that gave me problems, but nontheless, the data on > the tapes was useless. Every dump archive was incomplete. > > I encourage all amanda users to restrict themselves to using GNU-tar. > While it doesn't save i-node information, it's very rare that you need > this in a recovery scenario. All you really need is the file and meta > data to do a recovery. With this in mind, and me still hurting from a > disaster from which we could not recover, I changed our entire backup > system to use GNU-tar instead of native dump utilities. Since then I 've > done 3 complete restores and they were all successful. > > No one should have to lose data like that. I encourage all users to test > their backups regularly. ESPECIALLY if you use native Linux/Sun dump > utilties. > > I also found it interesting that even Linus Torvalds hates the dump > utility and is lobbying to have it removed from all Linux distributions. > > For those who are curious, I manually inspected the useless dump > archives on my tapes. I 'amrestore'd them to disk, and used an > interactive restore to test their integrity. What I found is, while the > data and listings index did exist on tape, the actual dump archive was > always incomplete as if the backup ran out of spool space before it > finished getting the dump archive from the server being backed up. > > Good Luck to all. > > Stephen.
