On Monday 31 July 2006 19:45, Jon LaBadie wrote: > On Mon, Jul 31, 2006 at 06:56:22PM +0100, Anne Wilson wrote: > > After the struggle to burn my tape-split backups onto DVD, I find myself > > wondering just how useful they are. The current set of backups are still > > on hard drive, but what if I want to find an earlier copy of a file which > > has since been burned onto DVD? > > > > It seems to me that once vtapes are free for overwriting the > > corresponding index will be lost too. Can either amrestore or amrecover > > actually access these files? > > Obviously not talking from experience here. > So this is just a conceptual framework for something that might work. > You do realize that you are, or will soon be, the leading expert > on saving amanda backups on optical media, right? > Now there's a scarey thought ;-)
> Suppose you had a different config for recovery (rec-config). > The rec-config might use nearly all the same config data and > could use the same curinfo/log/index directories as your > normal config. Further, suppose you never deleted (amrmtape) > or overwrote a vtape in your regular config (unless the dvd > data were no longer needed). That would keep the index and > log files available for amrecover. > Never overwrite a vtape? So it would be necessary to add vtapes from time to time? > Your rec-config could use a device, maybe with chg-manual, > that had "data" pointing to your dvd mount point (a symlink). > > I'm not thinking well enough to recommend how to handle the > current vtapes. Maybe rm the data a day or two before reuse, > relabel the vtape with amlabel for a new label, and maybe rename > the slot one greater than current max. > > > Another totally off-the-wall brainstorm; what if you reserve > one slot in your changer directory as a symbolic link to your > dvd mount point. Say it was slot99 or slot1 or ???. Perhaps > when amrecover asked for a particular tape you could mount > the appropriate dvd, and ammt/amtape it to the current active > changer position. > > I was thinking about that from my current installation. My > actual storage is on two external drives. My changer "slot" > directory is on the hard system's hard drive and the "slotXX" > directories are actually symbolic links to external drive > directories. It could just as well point to a mounted dvd > directory. > So that backup wouldn't actually write to the hard disk, but to the DVD? If it did that, tape-spanning would be problematic, wouldn't it? I can't see how it could work. > Such an approach would be testable with your current setup. > Rename the slotXX containing the original hard disk data. > Recreate slotXX as a symbolic link to your dvd data. Try > amrecover. > > You would still need to retain index etc. and relabel hd tapes. That's a lot to think about and experiment with. I'll play around a little when I can make time. Thanks for the ideas. Anne
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