[removed amanda-hackers -- not relevant]
Brooks, Jason wrote:
Short version:
Does a mechanism to share databases exist in amanda?
Short answer: use "ln", "ln -s", and use "include" directive in the amanda.conf.
Long version: (best with an example)
I want >4 different configurations. All but one will be in offsite storage. I want different configurations because then I will be assured that each tapeset I have in the changer will be a complete set that I change out each week for a new set.
So you have e.g. 4 set of tapes, each 7 tapes, of which 3 sets are offsite, and one set of 7 tapes is being used.
Why not simply label your tapes: daily-1-01, daily-1-02, .. daily-1-07, daily-2-01..daily-2-07, daily-3-01..daily-3-07, daily-4-01...etc.
That's one possibility. But now you're forgetting that there are holidays, sick people, tape drive problems, that all make that you get out-of-sync with the normal set-numbering. Sometimes you need an extra tape to flush the important backups, because on the normal tape had an error after writing only 15% of the tape. Sometimes an operator forgets to load the correct tape, and effectively you have no backup for that day etc (or only a little bit what fit in the holding disk).
Or you suddenly come to the conclusion that the tape that is expected to be overwritten the next night contains some very important data still to be recovered. When using the above numbering scheme you cannot easily remove a tape from the sequence.
So why not number the tapes sequentially, daily01-daily28; each week you bring in a set of the 7 oldest tapes in to be overwritten. You set dumpcycle to 7 (or even a little lower, to 6 or 5 days to have some redundancy in a set of 7 tapes too). And you just switch out next 7 tapes each time. When you get out-of-sync, a "set" is then defined as e.g. 2-8, 9-15, 16-22, 23-1 instead of 1-7, 8-14, 15-21, 22-28.
I can live with the not-so-nice-multiples-of-seven, and amanda doesn't even care. Put them in a coloured box, a different colour for each set, or a box labeled "SET-1", "SET-2" etc., and it's still easy enough to switch the sets.
I hope you do realize that for Amanda a valid set is just a sequence of tapes of from any "dumpcycle" days, be it 1-7, or 3-10. To be able to restore up to a certain date, you need all the preceeding "dumpcycle" number of tapes before that day. (That also why you should set runtapes much larger than dumpcycle.)
You can set runtapes to e.g. 21 instead of 28, but still keep 28 tapes in the cycle, resulting in any of the last 7 tapes being good enough to overwrite: no you can easily remove a tape from the cycle, without supplying a new one immediately too.
-- Paul Bijnens, Xplanation Tel +32 16 397.511 Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUM Fax +32 16 397.512 http://www.xplanation.com/ email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] *********************************************************************** * I think I've got the hang of it now: exit, ^D, ^C, ^\, ^Z, ^Q, F6, * * quit, ZZ, :q, :q!, M-Z, ^X^C, logoff, logout, close, bye, /bye, * * stop, end, F3, ~., ^]c, +++ ATH, disconnect, halt, abort, hangup, * * PF4, F20, ^X^X, :D::D, KJOB, F14-f-e, F8-e, kill -1 $$, shutdown, * * kill -9 1, Alt-F4, Ctrl-Alt-Del, AltGr-NumLock, Stop-A, ... * * ... "Are you sure?" ... YES ... Phew ... I'm out * ***********************************************************************
