On Thu, 23 May 2002 at 12:16pm, Almeida Ed wrote
> Can someone tell me how AMANDA decides what level backup to do? I'm getting
> level 1 everyday of the week. Not that this
> is a bad thing, but I'm new to AMANDA and am trying to get a better
> understanding of the configuration here.
> I thought AMANDA did incremental backups. Something like Monday level 1,
> Tuesday level 2, Wednesday level 3 ... and so on.
Amanda does (at least) one level 0 of each disklist entry per dumpcycle.
Other filesystems get incrementals. The levels of incrementals depend on
the estimates. Generally, amanda will try to do all level 1s. However,
if a lot of change has occurred ("a lot" is set by bumpsize and bumpmult
in amanda.conf), then amanda will bump to the next level (i.e. 2 if the
last dump of that filesystem was a 1, 3 if 2, etc).
If a lot of change *hasn't* occurred, and the estimated total size is
significantly lower than a usual night's run, then amanda will promote
dumps -- that is, do a level 0 of filesystems which aren't "due" yet.
Amanda's goal is to equalize tape usage each night while sticking to the
parameters set in amanda.conf.
--
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University
