From: [email protected] <[email protected]> On Behalf 
Of Chris Miller
Sent: Thursday, November 15, 2018 12:29 PM
To: amanda-users <[email protected]>
Subject: Re: Configuration confusion


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Hi Brian,
From: "Cuttler, Brian R (HEALTH)" 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
To: "Cuttler, Brian R (HEALTH)" 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>, "Chris 
Miller" <[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>, "amanda-users" 
<[email protected]<mailto:[email protected]>>
Sent: Wednesday, November 14, 2018 9:08:26 AM
Subject: RE: Configuration confusion
Tape custody – means what, retention policy or storage of the tape when not in 
the drive/juke?
Yes. Simplest is local custody. Off site custody comes in two media flavors -- 
local media and cloud. Off site costs, so we want to minimize this, as well as 
increases the response time for restorations. You get the idea. I don't use 
tapes; I use removable disks, optical media,and usb keydrives. General this is 
determined by the client, so when I plan this, I simply consider which client 
backups need to be sequestered where. This gives me a configuration where I can 
think in terms of "client <A> gets backedup to NAS <A>", where NAS <A> has 
different properties and different dispositions.


  *   Yes, I understand. I have worked at sites where offsite was someone’s 
house (tapes never came back in the right cycle, seems if you use them as hills 
under your train set you might not return the oldest tapes but bring back a 
mix). Other sites had tapes stored in the fire protected computer room, still 
others had them in a room in another part of the building, but it is a very big 
building.

Amanda is not an archiver in the sense that the tapes are cycled on a regular 
basis. You are able to tape a tape out of rotation and replace it, or create a 
unique tape label and perform level 0 backups to it and then mark it as 
no-reuse in the tapelist, but the primary function is not long term archiving, 
though the tools exist to do that very well.

You can use the same tape pool for all three Amanda configs, but they will need 
to have a common tapelist file. But if you are doing that then you are 
selecting a single set of standards for your data-at-rest security, in which 
case there is little reason to maintain 3 different configs.

Each Amanda config will look to level nightly data, but you will have nights 
with relatively little and nights with relatively large data volume swings, er 
think wave interference from physics. You eliminate a lot of that by combining 
disklists into a single configuration.
Yes! "Each Amanda config will look to level nightly data ..."  This is my 
principle question, and I seek to level the nightly data across all configs on 
a given night, which I recognize can't be done, so I seek to combine my 
multiple configs into a single config which specifies multiple sets of DLEs 
being mapped to multiple tapedev, if that can be done. For example, if the 
definition of tapedev had a "DLE ..." argument, and AMANDA were capable of this 
additional dimension of scheduling.


  *   See reply I put in subsequent email by Charles Curley that was a response 
to you.

Amanda will backup a new DLE at level 0 the first time it sees it. If you are 
worried about running long you will want to phase in the DLEs across several 
evenings. You may want to add the largest on Friday night, assuming that no one 
cares how late Amanda runs into Saturday. You will want to avoid adding 
multiple large DLEs on a single night, add a large and a small each night until 
they are all added.
"Phasing" my backup jobs may be my only choice, as that is exactly the problem 
I seek to avoid and I have been admonished to not try to subvert the scheduler 
by forcing level 0 backups to happen on my schedule. As I continue to discuss 
this, I am more and more convinced that AMANDA cannot schedule in two 
dimensions {(backups / night) X (nights / cycle)}

So, suppose I wanted to force my level 0 backups to happen at my discretion, so 
I can level my nightly run times. How would I do that?

Thanks for the help, Brian.
--
Chris.

V:916.974.0424
F:916.974.0428

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