On Wednesday 04 January 2017 15:29:37 Ochressandro Rettinger wrote: > The ultimate goal of all of this backing up, for us, is in > case there's some sort of catastrophic failure. Like, the server room > burns down. But if that happened, the machine that's making the tapes > would be lost as well. Which means that with my very limited knowledge of > Amanda, I don't know how to recover from a tape without the Amanda server > that created it. > > If I were to copy /var/lib/amanda and /etc/amanda to some > other remote system, is that enough to reconstruct the tape logs (for lack > of a better term) and configuration that would be needed to perform > recoveries? Obviously I'd need to install Amanda on the replacement > server, but if I had those files, would that let Amanda think that it was > the system that had created those tapes, at least enough to read them? Is > there a better way to do this? >
/etc/amanda, and wherever the amanda db files are (the infofile, logdir, indexdir, and tapelist settings from amanda.conf) You should also have copies of any encryption keys used. I would also recommend you have details on each client regarding at least drives sizes and partitioning, RAID setups, filesystem sizes and layouts, LVM configuration, etc, things you'll need to prep on them before restoring any data. Also, where you can find the latest database backups, and other stuff that amanda can't backup live, and how to restore those. Technically,you don't need the amanda config, the files can be extracted from the tapes for a bare-metal restore without needing the index files. You should document and practice your restoration process, for at least the amanda server and one full client machine of each type, to ensure it works. Full restores are a pain, honestly, testing the process before you need it makes panic time less stressful.
