Re: question (if tape server crash)

[Paul Bijnens]

Gene Heskett wrote:

On Wednesday 12 February 2003 21:22, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:

If the tape server is crashed, and I  reinstall Amanda, can the
NEW tape server
recognize previous backup tapes and retrive the files?
It looks unlikely.

As Martin Hepworth aludes to, one must have a backup of the indices available.

No, only if you want to use amrecover, to recover individual files
with the nice userinterface. But if the server crashed you probably
want to restore hole disks, which works fine with dd, and dump or gnutar (and gzip!). Even with dump or gnutar you could restore individual files or directories, if needed.

However, when I needed to recover from an hd dying last fall, I found that those files, which most certainly were included in the disklists DLE entries, were not on the tape, on any of the 20 tapes I had. Neither were the amanda executables that were running, or any other executable that was running on the system at the time of the backup. But in my case, the system stuff that wasn't, would

Strange! I just verified mine and all is on tape, programs, index-files (even some .gz.tmp files indicating it was just active at that time, of course, I would not rely on those just-being-rebuild-index files.)

already have been installed as part of the cd's re-install on the new hard drive, so thats pretty well a moot point. I'd restore the /home dir first in my case as thats where I'd find the latest build of amanda, and a simple make install from that recovered dir would fix that.

I came to the conclusion that because I was generating indices, that there must have been an exclusive lock on the files causing tar to skip them. I do not know if this problem is unique to my setup, unique to just linux, or a general one.

It must be something else, because there exist no such thing as an exclusive lock used or honoured by tar, afaik.

For a while I did a delay of those two DLE,s till the rest was long since done, and then did the backups of those two DLE's using a no index dumptype.

Could it be that in that time you had an old version of gnutar and/or amanda that exited with an errorcode instead of giving just a warning, when a file was removed between the time it found the name, and it tried to read its contents. Because the wrong error exitcode of tar, amanda trew the complete backupimage away (did it? I'm not sure anymore). One of my overcafeineted memory cells tells me there once, long time ago, existed such bug, but I could be wrong.
Anyway, it works in my setup now (2.4.3), without problems. As proof, I just restored the complete index-files and all of the configuration of my amanda setup of 4 weeks ago. And if I consult those files, I can see the index-files of tapes from 7 weeks ago (which in reality are already overwritten).


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Paul Bijnens, Xplanation Tel +32 16 397.511
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