> On Feb 5, 2019, at 4:34 PM, Chris Hoogendyk <[email protected]> wrote:
>
>
> On 2/5/19 5:24 PM, Debra S Baddorf wrote:
>>> On Feb 5, 2019, at 4:14 PM, Chris Hoogendyk <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> I'm running Amanda 3.4.5 on Ubuntu LTS Server 14.04 with an Overland
>>> NeoSeries 48 slot library with two LTO7 drives.
>>>
>>> I have near 100TB of external drives in various mdadm raid configurations
>>> with LVM managing the storage and about 110 DLEs in my disklist.
>>>
>>> One of the groups using the storage on this server has about 11TB of data
>>> representing more than 4 years of work by a group of people. It would be a
>>> real disaster to lose it, and they want an extra set of tapes as an archive.
>>>
>>> It seems pretty clear that amvault will do this. However, I'm trying to
>>> figure out the best way to configure it and get it done. If I set up a
>>> storage and label some archive types to belong to that, then I can get
>>> amvault to copy the latest fulls of a set of DLEs that correspond to their
>>> work from the regular backups to the archive tapes. I don't see any
>>> specific examples that show how to do that in detail (specifying particular
>>> DLEs); but, I'm also concerned that it would tie up two tapes drives (from
>>> and to), require me to load the appropriate tapes whenever it needed them,
>>> and probably take long enough that it would get in the way of the regular
>>> backups. I'm thinking it is likely to work like amrecover, where it tells
>>> me what tapes it needs and then I do `amtape -o storage="research" daily
>>> slot 7` (after looking at tapelist and changer status to figure out the
>>> slot).
>>>
>>> Is there some other way of configuring or doing this that is more
>>> efficient? Or that would only tie up one drive? I haven't done this yet.
>>> I'm just beginning to dig into it. Amanda 3.4.5 has amvault, but is it
>>> missing anything that would be gained by upgrading to, say, 3.5.1?
>>>
>>> Note that I do have holding disk space, but it is not excessively large in
>>> terms of what I am normally backing up or want to do for this archive job.
>>> It is made up of two 4TB SSDs. I could perhaps add some more holding disk
>>> by carving it out of LVM, but that would probably be slower with respect to
>>> the speed of the LTO7s.
>>>
>>> Is there any good documentation online beyond the man pages for the amvault
>>> and storage features? With examples?
>>>
>>>
>>> Chris Hoogendyk
>> For my own archival storage, I’ve found it easiest to create a second
>> configuration. No amvault.
>> Just a second cronjob that I run one weekend per month. It ONLY does level
>> 0’s, and uses the same
>> DLE that my “daily” job uses. But a different amanda.conf so that I can
>> specify no-incremental, no
>> re using tapes. More detailed info, if this option appeals to you.
>>
>> It takes longer than a daily job, for me, but uses the same tape drive.
>> (Daily jobs don’t get to run
>> on the weekend when this occurs).
>>
>> But I think you’ve already considered this option, and didn’t go that route.
>> Deb Baddorf
>> Fermilab
>
>
> I'll take that into consideration.
>
> I was assuming the amvault would be more efficient and faster, since it
> doesn't have to go through the tar pipe. Instead of tarring up a DLE, it
> would simply dd it from an existing LTO7. I'm not sure if amanda would be
> smart enough to construct a single dd from one LTO7 to another LTO7, but it
> would seem that that would be rather fast.
>
> Some time ago, I quit using gzip and just let the LTO7 do its own
> compression. I lose some planning and information that way (can't tell how
> well it actually compressed), but it seems to do well and is substantially
> faster. My server doesn't get overloaded with gzip processes.
>
> Also, I'm hoping I can configure an amvault archive, add tapes to it in the
> future, and specify different DLEs that people want to archive, all without
> changing the configuration, just marking tapes as don't re-use after I have
> an archive on them.
>
> ---------------
>
> Chris Hoogendyk
I’m not sure there is a lot of usage of amvault out there. I used it to copy
from old tapes to a disk,
moved the disk to another machine, and amvaulted again to copy from that disk
to a new flavor tape drive.
In 2014. *If* it’s been worked on since then, it may have more options.
Looking at the only documentation I’m aware of,
https://wiki.zmanda.com/man/amvault.8.html
it seems like you could do
amvault ….. -- latest-fulls -- dry-run
so that it will only TELL you what it plans to copy.
The “…..” is for the other options you’ll insert, like --src-labelstr label
or --src-storage storageName
and --dest-storage destStorageName
and of course CONF too.
Those should be double-dashes, per the documentation. My mac keeps changing
them to long-dashes,
so ignore any long-dashes that I forgot to change back.
Deb Baddorf
Fermilab
