Hi,

as my problem is solved now - thanks to Nathan - I want to share my knowledge:

The problem was indeed changing device IDs of LVM2 volumes. One can see this by 
using the following command:

stat --format="%D" <DIR on a LVM volume>

Run this command after a reboot and it will show the device ID of the volume 
the directory resides (example: fb04). 

If this number changes, tar will see all files on this volume as new, thus an 
incremental backup is that large as an level 0 would be.

Another method to see if the device number changes is to look at the 
(tar-)snapshot files on the client. On Ubuntu one can find them here:

/var/lib/amanda/gnutar-lists/...

There is a perl script, which parses these files and shows a summary how many 
times a specific device ID was found in the snapshotfile. The original script 
does not work with my perl version (5.10.1), but Nathan changed the script so 
that it worked for me. As I don't want to post the work of other people please 
ask Nathan to post his work.

Solution:
There is a Wiki article on zmanda.com with solutions: 
http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Tar_dumps_every_file_in_a_level-1_backup_after_a_hardware_change

For me, adding options to /etc/modprobe.conf didn't work (I guess because LVM 
is not a kernel module here). So I chose the solution from 
https://www.gnu.org/software/tar/manual/html_node/Incremental-Dumps.html#device-numbers
 to tell tar to do not check device IDs ( option --no-check-device). 
For that I added an application to amanda.conf and used this application in the 
dumptype for all DLEs residing on an LVM volume:

define application-tool app_amgtar {
        plugin "amgtar"
        property "CHECK-DEVICE" "NO"
}

define dumptype nocomp-tar-nocheckdevid-medium {
        global
        program "APPLICATION"
        application "app_amgtar"
        [...]
}

More information for creating applications can be found here:

http://wiki.zmanda.com/man/amanda-applications.7.html
http://wiki.zmanda.com/man/amgtar.8.html

Again, thank you Nathan for your great support and of course to all other guys, 
who tried to get me out of my troubles :-)

/Thomas

Reply via email to