Our sysadmin told me people were talking about unattended backups.
He copied me one response, and asked me to tell a little about what
we do.
I'd like to hear what others are doing too. How do I subscribe? Should
I send a mail message with subject 'subscribe' ?
Okay, here's what we do. We have 8mm 2GB exabyte drives, one of which
is dedicated for AFS backups. Since we have 4 volsets to do, I have to
change the tape 4 times, at least until we get an Exabyte stacker.
I have somewhat automated the backups with a number of scripts. The
first one is a shell script that figures out what month/week#/day it
is, then creates a file containing the commands I would normally
type into the "backup>" window.
Then I use "expect" to start the backup and butc in one window, and
send the file to the "backup>", kinda like this:
backup> dump users /november/week1/friday
dump proj /november/week1/friday
dump systems /november/week1/friday
dump orgs /november/week1/friday
The expect script then watches what backup is doing and prompts me for
the next tape when each previous one finishes.
For those who are wondering, expect is an extension of Tcl. What's
Tcl? It's a language for sending commands to interactive programs.
In case anyone has tried, you can't just automate AFS backups by
sending the "backup" some strings ( I know I tried ).
Okay, now can I ask the experts a question?
Is it possible to get all 4 of my volsets on one tape? The daily
backups don't seem to be using 2GB total, so I think I could fit
everything on one tape.
thanks,
PD
