Hi again, I've got another batch of questions while I consider switching to Amanda:
1) catalog (indecies) It seems the main catalog/database is stored in the index files. Is it straightforward to back these up? This doc (http://www.zmanda.com/protecting-amanda-server.html) sugests backing up these dirs/files to be able to restore an amanda configuration (and presumably the backup catalog): /etc/amandates, /etc/dumpdates, /etc/amanda, /var/lib/amanda. 2) Spanning and parts Say I split my 32TB of data into DLE's of 2-3TB. a) If I set a 'part' size of 150GB (10% of native tape capacity is what I saw recommended), what is the format of each part as it's written? Is each part its own tarfile? Seems that would make it easier to restore things manually. b) If a part spans two volumes, what's the format of that? Is it a single tarfile that's split in two? c) What's the manual restore process for such a spanned part? cat the two parts together and pipe to tar for extraction? 3) Restoring w/out Amanda I thought data was written to tape as tar files. But this page suggests a dumpfile is only readable by Amanda apps. Is a dumpfile something else? http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Dumpfile 4) holding disk and flushing I see how flushing can be forced when the holding disk has a certain % of tape size. Can a flush be forced every N days? The idea here would be to get data to tape at a min of every week or so, should successive incrementals be small. 5) alerting Is there a provision for email and/or other alerts on job completion or error, etc? Thanks! -M
