On Tue, Nov 23, 2010 at 02:34:17PM -0500, upengan78 wrote: > Thanks for the advise. > While Amanda can be used for your needs, it may not be an optimal choice. Amanda is a backup manager, she makes choices about what and how to backup your DLEs. But you are trying to do most or all of Amanda's job for her. OTOH, your environment is simple enough (one host, one DLE, 50GB data) that self-management is not unreasonable.
Amanda's design addressed a problem that can be seen even in your scheme; a monster dump once a week, tiny incrementals the other days. Amanda tries to balance the amount of data dumped each day by spreading the level 0 dumps out over the entire dumpcycle. So each day some DLEs get incrementals and a few others get full dumps. Obviously with only one DLE, it is difficult to spread the fulls out. Sizing your vtapes is a concern. Make them large enough to hold a full dump and you waste lots of space on incremental days. To deal with this, choose a relatively small size and tell Amanda that she can use multiple tapes if needed (i.e. set runtapes to an appropriate number). You will also have to allow tape spanning, otherwise the media has to be big enough to hold the entire DLE. Spanning is not default. You can create multiple DLEs from your current single DLE. This is done using include and exclude directives. For example, you could have /var, /home, /usr/share, /usr ex- cluding /usr/share, /opt, etc. Then a final DLE that starts at / and is a catch-all which excludes the directories in the other DLEs. You asked what someone meant by oversubscribing your vtapes. It means your vtapes are sized to use more than one per dump and recognizing that, on average, the last one each day is only half full. My setup has 2300GB of space for vtapes and I've created 100 x 25GB tapes, i.e. 2500GB if all are full. But because of those partially full tapes I actually have 270GB of free space, only about 85% full. I could push it and add another 5 or 10 vtapes :)). Jon -- Jon H. LaBadie [email protected] JG Computing 12027 Creekbend Drive (703) 787-0884 Reston, VA 20194 (703) 787-0922 (fax)
