On Saturday 26 September 2020 08:54:46 Dave Sherohman wrote: > On Sat, Sep 26, 2020 at 01:35:51PM +0100, J Martin Rushton wrote: > > If your law school is using TSM, then the only use for Amanda would > > be to back up the small machines onto the central server, and then > > TSM can migrate (HSM) or backup to tape/slow disk. > > Guess my overview of the history and organizations involved was a bit > too brief... > > My department is the central university library. We're not officially > affiliated with the law school, they just offered backups as a service > when they set up their own backup system, and we contracted with them > to purchase that service. But now we want to terminate that contract > and start handling backups ourselves, within the library's own IT > group, which will remove both TSM and the law school from the picture > entirely.
Which amanda can do. The problem we see most often is how amanda goes about scheduling those backups as it does not use a fixed schedule. It will do a full of a given Disk List Entry, called a DLE, within the time period its told to, but within that time period, it will shuffle the order around to attempt using about the same amount of media each run. This was valuable when smaller tapes and less than reliable drives were the norm, but not so much today with the advent of huge hard drives that are hundreds of times more dependable and the tapes turning into directories per run, and files within those directories. Amanda tracks all that so you don't have to. But amrecover can restore a previous version of a file if it needs to also. Commercial time, but no money involved. I've written a wrapper, and you may have to edit it a bit to suit your needs, a GenesAmandaHelper which allows amanda to do a bare metal restore to the state the system was in at the completion of the just completed run, whereas that situation without my wrapper loses a runs data because the recorded index could be from yesterdays run. My scripts attach both the index data, including that generated by the just completed run to the end of each run, and also the amanda configuration that made that backup. This is a considerable amount of data that would be missing from amandas database in the event the drive holding it went toes up. That extra file from last nights run is currently 594,288,640 bytes of data here for the 5 machine backup from last night and is the indice data from 60 vtapes on a 2TB drive. All of it. The backed up configuration OTOH is only about 12k, but if the drive it lives on expires, you've still got a working config on the /amandatapes drive in the Dailys/data directory. And I sleep better. Copyright 2020 by Maurice E. Heskett Cheers, Gene Heskett -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) If we desire respect for the law, we must first make the law respectable. - Louis D. Brandeis Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
