Hi Chris On 13/08/09, Chris Hoogendyk ([email protected]) wrote: > ... the solution is akin to the Japanese monks caring for Bonzai....
I liked this idea about tape archives -- constant pruning and maintenance. Difficult to sell though. > As for your specific questions: > > You should be able to do LVM snapshots. I use fssnap on Solaris 9 and > 10, and scanning through, here are just a couple of references I find > to people using LVM snapshots with Amanda: <snip> > With the latest releases of Amanda, there is a new API that could make > it even easier to implement. Great; thanks for the pointers. > Typically, we set up Amanda with holding disk space. <snip> If all the storage is locally attached (actually, AoE drives storage units connected over Ethernet), I am hoping to avoid the disk space if I can write to tape fast enough. I'd like to avoid paying for up to 15TB of fast holding disk space if I can avoid it. > Compression can be done either on the client, on the server, or on > the tape drive. Obviously, if you use software compression, you want > to turn off the tape drive compression. I use server side > compression, because I have a dedicated Amanda server that can > handle it. By not using the tape drive compression, Amanda has more > complete information on data size and tape usage for its planning. > If your server is more constrained than your clients, you could use > client compression. This is specified in your dumptypes in your > amanda.conf. I don't have any clients, so this is an interesting observation. I'll be trying to do sofware compression then I think. The Unix backup book (google for "amanda software compression") suggests that compression can be used on a "per-image basis"; presumably I can pass the backup data stream through gzip or bzip2 on the way to a tape? > Deduplication is not available with Amanda. However, some people > stage different kinds of tools and use Amanda for the final staging > and management of tapes and archives. So, in some situations, > BackupPC could be used to do deduplication from, say, desktop > clients to a server archive which is then backed up by Amanda. That > could start complicating your 12 year recovery scenario and what > happens when software is not available or doesn't run. Great -- thanks for the details. > Amanda uses the term "index" rather than "catalog" -- see > http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Amanda_Index. > > Note that if you are putting tapes into a long term archive with no > intent of recycling them in subsequent backups, you can use amadmin > to mark them as no-reuse. I periodically (typically at the end of > semesters) do a force full, mark the tapes as no-reuse, and then > pull them out of my tapecycle and put them in storage. Very useful again, thanks. Regards Rory -- Rory Campbell-Lange Director [email protected] Campbell-Lange Workshop www.campbell-lange.net 0207 6311 555 3 Tottenham Street London W1T 2AF Registered in England No. 04551928
