Hi All, I'm currently using Amanda for daily backups. After some experimenting and initial trouble with the tape-drive (see below) everything seems fine.
Our old backup scheme (which used "human planning") allowed us to use the previous full-backup tape(set) to be used as fire-backup (stored off-site). I understand that the standard way of achieving this with amanda is to use a different configuration, run only once a week, which would do a full-backup of everything, without recording dates in /etc/amdates. While this is a possible solution, it appears a little cumbersome. Also, one of our servers is very slow, and getting it to do an -extra- full backup every weekend is not very attractive. Instead, I would like to save the diskfiles amanda produces on my holding disk after a flush, and do an extra flush of all level 0's, the last level 1's and the last level 2's. As my tapedrive doesn't like to be kept open without feeding data to it, I run amdump without a tape in the drive, and run amflush afterwards. This has the advantage that I can issue a cp -lR /scratch/amanda /scratch/amanda_backup command inbetween. This basically saves my tape-files on disk from being removed by amflush. Apart from the fact that I have to give the amflush command by hand, this setup is working reasonably well. On the other hand, amanda forgets about these files as soon as they are flushed to tape, and they are no longer usable for a quick-and-easy restrore from holdingdisk. Does anyone have a nice-and-easy solution for this? Administrativa: I'm using 1) stock RH 7.2 amanda RPM's which has the obvious advantage that rebuilding the tapeserver is a snap. 2) An Onstream ADR 50 drive 3) 9 tapes with 5 dumps a week and a dumpcycle of a week. Regards, Edwin Hakkennes
