Dustin J. Mitchell wrote:
On Sun, Sep 12, 2010 at 9:36 PM, John Hein <jh...@symmetricom.com> wrote:
This may not be considered a nitpick but more of a feature request.
If I move a disk or rename a host or move the host to a different
domain, it'd be nice to be able to rename the disklist entry (DLE) and
have history tracking, incremental planning, and most importantly
recover/restore operations off tape know to follow the rename.
Maybe it's as simple as allowing one or more "alternate DLE name" or
"alias" (if you will) entries in a DLE (note the casual insertion of
the word "simple" does not imply I have a patch, sorry).
Going back and doing a rename on log files, index files, dump files,
etc., is, of course, not practical and not really desired in terms of
representing history of a name change.
This is an interesting idea, both for the purpose you describe, and
for the very futuristic and don't-get-excited-yet idea of "virtual
DLEs", where Amanda automatically splits DLEs based on size of
subdirectories. The main problem with virtual DLEs has been recovery:
if Amanda is backing up a particular file in a different DLE every
day, then it's going to be difficult to find it when it comes to
running amrecover. Incrementals are also a problem: changing the
boundaries between DLEs obviously requires doing a full backup of all
of the affected DLEs on the next run. At least, unless we're going to
become gnutar-specific and start futzing with the data in the backups
on the server side.
As you can see, complicated. But a consistent approach to storing the
DLE and path of a particular "user object" over time would be a useful
first step. Do you have any thoughts on how that might be
implemented?
Dustin
The way I see it the DLE is for the admin to make sub divisions in the
backup to
make backing up easier to manage. The software should store the file
object with
path and hostname, with the DLE as an after thought; that way for the other
direction of recovery I only need the Date, file and hostname, the backup
software should do the gruntwork to find the tape required and DLE if it
needs to
know to get my file back.
Chris.
