On Tue, Apr 06, 2004 at 12:12:05PM +0100, William Hargrove wrote: > Hello All, > > I would like to ask a general Amanda backup 'strategy' question here, given > by backup 'goals' below. I have a configured and working Amanda set-up but I > want to try and fit a backup policy that I believe is best suited to our > site around Amanda. > > I have an 8-tape (DLT 35/70gb each) auto changer library linked to Amanda > via mtx, this works well. > > I want to do a full backup of various file systems on a remote host once a > week and then, ideally, incremental backups once a day to that same tape. At > the end of a week's backup, the tape should switch. One week's backup is far > less than a single tape's capacity. > > I would like to be able to hold 8 weeks worth of backups on tape, that is > one tape a week and then reuse the oldest tape. > > I'm not sure this is possible with Amanda.. as I believe I can't append the > daily incremental backups onto the same tape as the full backups. Is it the > case that if I want to run Amanda every day that I would also have to use a > tape every day, thus meaning the tapes in the library are all used after a > week. I'm fixed in the number of tapes I can use and can't add/replace them, > so they would get reused after a week and wouldn't provide much of a 'backup > horizon'. > > If this isn't possible does anyone have some suggestions? I was thinking I > could do the incremental backups to a hard disk area on the tape server each > night and then run Amanda once a week to archive the full backups plus the > HDD incremental ones. >
Where is that "Top Ten Questions" document when you need it? Amanda will not reuse a tape for a new run of amdump, fulls or incrementals, until it cycles through "tapecycle" number of tapes. So you are correct, amanda will NOT append a second amdump to a tape. Amanda only overwrites tapes! However, an amflush can overwrite a tape with multiple dumps from the holding disk. Thus collect as many amdumps as you want with the tape offline. Then amflush when you want to tape them. -- Jon H. LaBadie [EMAIL PROTECTED] JG Computing 4455 Province Line Road (609) 252-0159 Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)
