On Tuesday 27 February 2007, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: >On Tue, Feb 27, 2007 at 11:43:54PM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: >> Doing almost exactly that with nothing but a cd with dd tar & gzip on >> it, was the driving force behind my writing a handfull of scripts >> collectively called Genes-Amanda-Helper-0.5. > >I can throw in some more too-little-too-late advice: I run a nightly >crontask to back up both my Amanda configuration and my indices to >another machine via rsync.
I did this for quite a while, and TBT, its one more way of spreading that one single point of failure a little thinner. But my FILE: backups to a separate disk have worked so well (many times more dependable than my tape setup ever was) so I've given myself that hours worth of cpu time back. I may regret that at some point, but so far I've had no reason to fear an instant failure of both drives. I will get hopefully, some advance warning of impending doom if my /var goes read-only as its on another partition of that same 200GB drive the vtapes are on. Those scripts I mentioned are available on the zmanda site if anyone is curious. >I have done one bare-metal restore this way >-- basically, I reinstalled the original OS, installed Amanda on it (I >didn't have any trouble with version mismatches -- Amanda's tape format >is fairly stable), copied the indexes back, and ran amrecover. It was a >bit sketchy to be overwriting all that data on a running system >(especially since the restore won't delete files that didn't exist on >the backup), but worked out pretty well in the end. That was also my experience the one time I had to do a bare metal. That was 4 or 5 years ago, and I've not lost a hard drive since, knock on wood. >I think, in future, that I'd prefer to set up a CD with one of the >LiveCD distros that's easily modified, add Amanda to it, and keep that >around. Because of the relative ease with which it could be kept up to date, I think I'd opt for a 2GB compact flash, the adaptor to make your IDE controller think its a drive is only about 3 bucks. I'm running my router/firewall (dd-wrt) on one of 256 megs, no other drive in the box. >Dustin -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2007 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.
