There are a number of issues here that are hard to answer without more
information about your setup, volume of data and budget. These are
things that every backup administrator has to answer, and there is no
particular "right" answer.
One issue is how and when to do archives with Amanda. It's necessary
to realize that if you do an archive (say monthly), it is a snapshot
in time. There will be files that existed in between archives that are
not on the archives. I have arbitrarily decided to do archives at the
end of semesters, because I'm in an academic setting, and, typically,
data, accounts, etc. are likely to cycle before the beginning of the
next semester. During a semester, things are more fluid. I run a 6
week cycle of tapes to give me fairly solid coverage in case I need to
recover something. I also tell faculty and staff that if they lose
something, the sooner they tell me, the better.
I have, in the past, just marked some tapes for no-reuse after
examining the reports to make sure every DLE was represented by a full
on that set of tapes. Then I add more tapes to fill out the cycle. I'm
planning on a slightly different tactic this Christmas. On a long
weekend I'm going to force all the DLEs to full, let it run its
course, and then retire that tape (or tapes) for archive by marking
them no-reuse. I'll probably keep end of semester archives for at
least 2 years.
Once upon a time (mid 1990's), I ran daily backups (typical
combination of fulls and incrementals) and never re-used or discarded
a tape, ever. In that situation, I could go back to any day in the
history of the company and recover a file from any computer. But, I
always had to buy new tapes every month. With the explosion of data
and storage capacities, that is harder to do now. It takes much larger
backup capacity and higher budgets. If you have terrabytes of data,
you're talking serious money, and the bean counters are going to want
to balance the cost.
So, you filled(?) your 30 days of tapes, and now you want to put that
somewhere before you begin to fill another 30 days worth. How much
data is that? And where did you figure on storing it? If you are using
tapes in the first place, it seems fair to assume you don't have that
much excess disk space sitting around. If you want it all, then you
could just keep adding new tapes to your cycle. If you are not filling
the tapes, you could use a holding disk, configure Amanda so that it
would do both fulls and incrementals to the holding disk, and then
only put a tape in when the holding disk was approaching full. Amanda
would automatically flush it all out to tape on the next run (on the
other runs you'd get tape errors, but it would do the backups to the
holding disk). If your data capacity allowed you to put a tape in only
once a week, then 52 tapes would run your backups for a year.
Yes. my tapes are 30 tapes and I want to put that somewhere before I
begin to fill another 30 days worth. The data is around 300GB and I want
to restore it in same HDD just take them out from tapes. I am not using
tape but using HDD (tapeless).
You could also set up a separate archive configuration for Amanda,
schedule it to run once a month, and make sure the schedule doesn't
interfere with the normal daily runs. I prefer to have all the book
keeping and indexes in one configuration, but you may have other
priorities.
May I know how to setup a separate archive for Amanda? I will have to
try it.
There are a multitude of possible ways to configure backups with
Amanda. You should have enough information from running Amanda up to
this point to see how much data you have to backup and how well your
tape capacity, server, and network handle that. Then you put that
together with your budget and decide what is going to work for you for
a long term strategy.
One point I would make, though, is that recovering from backup in
order to make an archive is probably not a good strategy. You would
need a large enough capacity disk to handle the recovery, and you
would lose the client machine information in the process, since the
archive backup would only know that it came from your recovery disk.
Hopefully, my comments along with Jon's will help you decide how to
configure your long term strategy.
I am using 1TB HDD (RAID 5 LVM). I will need to add more HDD if I want
to restore in the same machine. That is my planing for now. I am a
newbie for Amanda. If u guys have a better solutions for me I would be
appreciate it. Thanks a lot for your meaningful explanations. :-)
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