On Monday 16 December 2002 17:44, Sykora, Dale wrote: >Hello, > I am new to amanda and want to determine if fits my needs. Any > pointers are appreciated. Will backup_size>tape_size work? Old > backup routine... Weekly full backup on Fri and incremental > Mon-Thu. Full~=20Gb"2tapes" and inc~=1Gb. Tape drive is > dds3/12Gb. I read that amanda cannot handle backup>tape. So my > first assumption is full>dds3 will fail. Elsewhere I read amanda > spreads full/partial backups to many tapes. This makes me think > full+(5*inc)<(5*dds3) which will pass. > >Thanks, > >Dale
The normal procedure for amanda is to attempt to spread the backup out, mixing level 0's with incrementals in an attempt to use about the same amount of tape each night. The caveat about amanda not handlng backups > tape is not a realy problem to most folks because you can specify not the whole drive, but the individual subdirs on that drive in the disklist. Those individual subdirs can usually be subdivided further it its required, and its this individual disklist entry that is the limit, not the whole disk, or even partition. For this reason, we usually recommend using tar rather than dump becauce dumps granularity is the size of the partition which can be a limit. Amanda cannot span a single DLE across more than one tape because when an EOT is hit, amanda will, if given permission to, advance to the next tape. However, that particular file will be restarted from the beginning on the next tape. If that file by itself is too big, then it will repeat this until the magazine has been used up, or it hits the "usetapes" limit. When bringing up a system for the first time, its common to setup the disklist file, but have enough of it commented out that whats left is a bit less than a tapefull. Uncomment about that many entries the next night, and the night after that, till they're are all active. Then in a tapecyle or so, amanda will pretty much have her own schedule worked out. Once up and running, the recovery is the same, you will still need the last "dumpcycle" tapes for a full uptodate recovery. If your dumpcycle is say 7 days, then its the same as having one big friday full, and 6 more incrementals to recover from Because its just good sense to have more tapes than dumpcycle, mainly so you aren't overwriting your last good backup with the new one. I may be doing a bit of overkill here. My dumpcycle is 5 days, it runs 7 days a week, and I have 28 tapes in the rotation. Cheap DDS2 tapes in ths case. I use about 3 of the 4 gigs each tape can hold or a bit less on each run. My changer holds 4 tapes at once. There is a bad version of tar about you should be aware of. If tar --version returns 1.13 or less, you'll need a newer one. Good luck! -- Cheers, Gene AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M Athlon1600XP@1400mhz 512M 99.20% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
