On Wed, Jul 10, 2002 at 01:21:40PM +0100, Mark Cooke wrote:
> I have now configured amanda to work the was it wants, rather than the
> way *I* want (ref: Quick Tape cycle Query),I have now replaced all my
> DDS2 tapes with DDS3 and ammended this section to read for 'DailySet':
>
> dumpcycle 2 weeks
> runspercycle 12
> tapecycle 15 tapes
>
> which AFAIK will run a dumpcycle of 2 weeks, with 2 full backups and
> incrementals 6 days a week, with a tape amount of 15
Not quite.
First major item, you are specifying a full backup once every 2 weeks.
Not twice. Assuming I understand what you want, I think dumpcycle
should be 1 week, and runspercycle should be 6. This will say you
play to run amdump 6 times in a 1 week cycle. During that cycle
everything should get a full backup at least once, incrementals
the other runs. So your 15 tapes will contain a total of 2.5
cycles. Any 6 sequential tapes will contain at least one full
backup of everything.
Second, the full/incremental decision is made during each dump run,
separately for each entry in your disklist. The disklist entries can
be a single file sytem or it can be a directory tree. Assuming your
disklist has a sufficient number of entries, each dump run will be
a mixture of full dumps for some entries, incrementals for others.
Third, the full dump frequency you specify is a "minimum". For any
particular disklist entry, amanda may decided to do its full dump
earlier than necessary. This can happen because amanda is trying
to balance the size of the daily backups or because so much changed
that the difference between a full and an incremental is small,
so why not do a full backup.
>
> But have I got my understanding of the following correct:
>
> 1. holding drives:
> I have specified 2 hdds to use as holding areas in the amanda.conf,
> called 'holding' and 'holding2'
> Am I correct in thinking that if holding gets full, then it will
> continue onto holding2?
That is not my experience, but don't ask me how amanda decides
which holding disk to use. It seems to use all 3 of my holding
areas each run. Perhaps in part it tries to use a different
holding disk than the disk being dumped.
> 2. dumpcycle:
> With the example below:
>
> define dumptype root-tar {
> global
> program "GNUTAR"
> comment "root partitions dumped with tar"
> exclude list "/etc/amanda/DailySet/exclude.files"
> compress server best
> priority high
> index yes
> record yes
> }
>
> define dumptype user-tar {
> root-tar
> comment "user partitions dumped with tar"
> compress server best
> priority low
> index yes
> record yes
> }
>
> If I define user-tar in diskypes, am I correct in thinking that the
> 'root-tar' directive specified within user-tar, means use the settings
> from the dumptype 'root-tar', but override them with the extra settings
> in user-tar?
Yes, the last 4 lines of user-tar could be eliminated as they duplicate
root-tar entries.
BTW I find compress ... "BEST" to suck up lots of cpu for marginal
improvement in compression. YMMV
--
Jon H. LaBadie [EMAIL PROTECTED]
JG Computing
4455 Province Line Road (609) 252-0159
Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)
