Re: Tape changer question
John Hein wrote at 16:00 -0700 on Dec 13, 2008: Tim Bunnell wrote at 17:03 -0500 on Dec 13, 2008: Folks, We're running Amanda (version 2.5.1p1) on a Debian Linux system with an 8-tape AIT-2 library. We have around 314GB spread over two file systems that we are attempting to backup in one run across as many tapes as necessary. We're using gzip compression and expect it will take 5-6 tapes to complete (there's a fair amount of audio and image data that doesn't compress too well). I think we have the config files set up correctly, but it seems like no matter what we do, the run stops (after about 16 hours) and reports that it's out of tape. I don't think it has ever succeeded in spanning more than 4 tapes before giving us the error. I see nothing in the .debug output for the changer that looks different for any tapes it changes. I'm sort of at a loss for where to start looking for the problem, and what to look for. Any suggestions from the list? Do you really know the tape capacity for your tapes? Some AIT-2 flavors are 36 GB, some are 50 GB, it seems. 36*8 314 Have you run amtapetype to verify? (see http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Tapetype_definitions) Do you have hardware compression off? Sorry, I just re-read and saw that it only used 4 tapes. What is runtapes set to? Somewhere in the logs, it should explain why it's not going past 4.
Re: Tape changer question
Tim Bunnell wrote at 17:03 -0500 on Dec 13, 2008: Folks, We're running Amanda (version 2.5.1p1) on a Debian Linux system with an 8-tape AIT-2 library. We have around 314GB spread over two file systems that we are attempting to backup in one run across as many tapes as necessary. We're using gzip compression and expect it will take 5-6 tapes to complete (there's a fair amount of audio and image data that doesn't compress too well). I think we have the config files set up correctly, but it seems like no matter what we do, the run stops (after about 16 hours) and reports that it's out of tape. I don't think it has ever succeeded in spanning more than 4 tapes before giving us the error. I see nothing in the .debug output for the changer that looks different for any tapes it changes. I'm sort of at a loss for where to start looking for the problem, and what to look for. Any suggestions from the list? Do you really know the tape capacity for your tapes? Some AIT-2 flavors are 36 GB, some are 50 GB, it seems. 36*8 314 Have you run amtapetype to verify? (see http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Tapetype_definitions) Do you have hardware compression off?
Re: Tape changer question
Hi John, Do you know where in the logs to look for the problem? So far we're missing it. BTW, these tapes seem to hold just north of 42 GB each and hardware compression is off because we're using gzip. t John Hein wrote: John Hein wrote at 16:00 -0700 on Dec 13, 2008: Tim Bunnell wrote at 17:03 -0500 on Dec 13, 2008: Folks, We're running Amanda (version 2.5.1p1) on a Debian Linux system with an 8-tape AIT-2 library. We have around 314GB spread over two file systems that we are attempting to backup in one run across as many tapes as necessary. We're using gzip compression and expect it will take 5-6 tapes to complete (there's a fair amount of audio and image data that doesn't compress too well). I think we have the config files set up correctly, but it seems like no matter what we do, the run stops (after about 16 hours) and reports that it's out of tape. I don't think it has ever succeeded in spanning more than 4 tapes before giving us the error. I see nothing in the .debug output for the changer that looks different for any tapes it changes. I'm sort of at a loss for where to start looking for the problem, and what to look for. Any suggestions from the list? Do you really know the tape capacity for your tapes? Some AIT-2 flavors are 36 GB, some are 50 GB, it seems. 36*8 314 Have you run amtapetype to verify? (see http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Tapetype_definitions) Do you have hardware compression off? Sorry, I just re-read and saw that it only used 4 tapes. What is runtapes set to? Somewhere in the logs, it should explain why it's not going past 4. -- Director, Center for Pediatric Auditory and Speech Sciences (CPASS) Head, Speech Research Lab| Adjunct Associate Professor duPont Hospital for Children | Comp. and Info. Sciences / Linguistics Voice: 1+302+651-6835| University of Delaware Fax: 1+302+651-6895| URL: www.asel.udel.edu/speech/
RE: Tape Changer Question
If I understand the working of Amanda correctly, Amanda will postpone some full dumps if the estimate of all the filesystems are larger than one tape even though the setup is to use two tape drives. Amanda will write to one tape until the full and write to the second tape. Correct me if I'm wrong. Can Amanda breaks up the backup job so it can spread the filesystems that are backup to multiple tapes? For example, amanda will backup those filesystems that fits on one tape and backup the rest of the filesystems to the other tape which will reduce the postpone of some full backups. Yan Lam - Systems Administrator Unify Corporation, http://www.unify.com T: 916 * 928-6226 E: [EMAIL PROTECTED] The brightest future will always be based on a forgotten past, you can't go on well in life until you let go of your past failures and heartaches. -Original Message- From: Jon LaBadie [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, November 15, 2002 9:57 PM To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: Re: Tape Changer Question On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 03:05:01PM -0800, Yan Lam wrote: Currently, I have Amanda doing backups with two tape drives ( both are DLT7000 drives). I noticed that Amanda deferred many level 0 backups with the ...[dumps too big, full dump delayed] in the log file. The first tape is filled; however, the second tape only taped 8GB of data. My question is that if Amanda is setup to use both tape drives (both tapes), wouldn't Amanda will try to fill up both tape as much as possible instead of postpone the level0 backups? More likely the estimated size of the dump of that disklist entry (DLE) was larger than would fit on the tape. Remember that amanda can not backup a DLE that is larger than a single tape. -- Jon H. LaBadie [EMAIL PROTECTED] JG Computing 4455 Province Line Road(609) 252-0159 Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)
Re: Tape Changer Question
On Fri, Nov 15, 2002 at 03:05:01PM -0800, Yan Lam wrote: Currently, I have Amanda doing backups with two tape drives ( both are DLT7000 drives). I noticed that Amanda deferred many level 0 backups with the ...[dumps too big, full dump delayed] in the log file. The first tape is filled; however, the second tape only taped 8GB of data. My question is that if Amanda is setup to use both tape drives (both tapes), wouldn't Amanda will try to fill up both tape as much as possible instead of postpone the level0 backups? More likely the estimated size of the dump of that disklist entry (DLE) was larger than would fit on the tape. Remember that amanda can not backup a DLE that is larger than a single tape. -- Jon H. LaBadie [EMAIL PROTECTED] JG Computing 4455 Province Line Road(609) 252-0159 Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)
RE: Tape changer question
What you are asking for is technically possible, and not all that difficult, but ill-advised. If something blows up during the backup on Sunday, you are back to the previous Sunday's backups, if you still have them. (If you don't have them, you're really toast.) Unless bludgeoned otherwise, AMANDA will automatically distribute full backup (level 0) of the different file systems across a series of tapes, so that a catastrophic failure of the tape server only costs you a small impact in restorability. The indexes keep track of which backups are on which tapes, allowing you to restore disks or files by selection. AMANDA will then tell you which tape(s) you need. This will also give you more predictable run times for your backups. -Original Message- From: Ian Eure [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, February 15, 2002 3:16 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Tape changer question Hi there. I have a HP C1557A (SureStore DAT 24x6) tape changer that I'm using with Amanda. What I'd like to do is this: Full backup on Sunday night, split across the 6 tapes in the changer Incremental backups Monday-Saturday, each on one of the 6 tapes in the changer. Do I need two different backup types to do this? E.g. one Weekly backup job, and a Daily job that backs up to the first tape in the changer, and moves to the next tape each day after? Any advice is appreciated.
Re: Tape changer question
On Friday 15 February 2002 12:49 pm, Bort, Paul wrote: What you are asking for is technically possible, and not all that difficult, but ill-advised. If something blows up during the backup on Sunday, you are back to the previous Sunday's backups, if you still have them. (If you don't have them, you're really toast.) Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear enough... The changer has a 6-tape cartridge. I want to use one full empty cart on Sunday for full backups, replace the cart Monday, and use a single tape in the (new) cart for the incrementals Monday-Saturday, and drop another new cart in on Sunday for that week's full dump. I primarily want it this way because I can't go on-site every day to change the tape cartridge. It may be trivial, but I'm still an Amanda newbie. Well, I'm still a centrally-located-network-backup-to-changer newbie, which may be hindering me more. Anyways... can you divulge how I'd get this running, or suggest a better solution? It seems silly to stick 6 DAT tapes (24gb) in a tape cartridge that has to be swapped out every day when the daily incremental backups aren't breaking 250mb. I'm completely open to alternate solutions if you can suggest one.
Re: Tape changer question
On Fri, 15 Feb 2002, Ian Eure wrote: Anyways... can you divulge how I'd get this running, or suggest a better solution? It seems silly to stick 6 DAT tapes (24gb) in a tape cartridge that has to be swapped out every day when the daily incremental backups aren't breaking 250mb. I'm completely open to alternate solutions if you can suggest one. Umm, excuse me if I'm being rude, but duh. You stick 6 DAT tapes in the cartridge on Monday, and let Amanda use /one/ tape each night. It automatically gets a full set of level 0 dumps over the course of the week, as well as incrementals every night. This is what amanda is designed to do and it works damned well. I use 10 35GB AIT tapes per two weeks to backup my data and I see amanda getting a full set of level 0s done every three days or so, plus incrementals every night. Amanda is not a traditional backup system where you get full dumps weekly and incrementals every night. Amanda is designed to minimize time between full dumps, so you can get them more than once a week, and to insure that you always have incrementals to restore to any day within the dumpcycle. It is also designed to fill up your tapes. You should never be putting 250mb on a 24gb tape. You should always be putting 24gb on the tape. Amanda will do this for you. -- Brandon D. Valentine [EMAIL PROTECTED] Computer Geek, Center for Structural Biology This isn't rocket science -- but it _is_ computer science. - Terry Lambert on [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Tape changer question
On Friday 15 February 2002 01:39 pm, Brandon D. Valentine wrote: On Fri, 15 Feb 2002, Ian Eure wrote: Anyways... can you divulge how I'd get this running, or suggest a better solution? It seems silly to stick 6 DAT tapes (24gb) in a tape cartridge that has to be swapped out every day when the daily incremental backups aren't breaking 250mb. I'm completely open to alternate solutions if you can suggest one. Umm, excuse me if I'm being rude, but duh. You stick 6 DAT tapes in the cartridge on Monday, and let Amanda use /one/ tape each night. It automatically gets a full set of level 0 dumps over the course of the week, as well as incrementals every night. This is what amanda is designed to do and it works damned well. I use 10 35GB AIT tapes per two weeks to backup my data and I see amanda getting a full set of level 0s done every three days or so, plus incrementals every night. Amanda is not a traditional backup system where you get full dumps weekly and incrementals every night. Amanda is designed to minimize time between full dumps, so you can get them more than once a week, and to insure that you always have incrementals to restore to any day within the dumpcycle. It is also designed to fill up your tapes. You should never be putting 250mb on a 24gb tape. You should always be putting 24gb on the tape. Amanda will do this for you. Sorry for being ignorant. Frankly, I'm completely lost trying to get Amanda set up properly. As I said, I have zero experience with Amanda, and this type of network backup in general. I've read through what Amanda documentation I can find (not much) and it hasn't explained the Amanda Way of doing backups. If you can point me to some reasonable documentation which explains things better, /please/ do - I'll go read it all before I bother you again. Let's recap: Last Sunday, I did a full dump onto 6 blank tapes. Monday, swapped the cartridge out for 6 new tapes. Monday's backups went fine. Tuesday through yesterday, I got this error: *** A TAPE ERROR OCCURRED: [new tape not found in rack]. Some dumps may have been left in the holding disk. Run amflush to flush them to tape. The next 6 tapes Amanda expects to used are: a new tape, a new tape, a new tape, a new tape, a new tape, a new tape. The backups are sitting in my backup spool directory. I've run amlabel on all the tapes in all the caddies. Amanda is configured to use my changer thusly: -- snip -- runtapes 6 # explained in WHATS.NEW tpchanger chg-zd-mtx # the tape-changer glue script, see TAPE.CHANGERS changerdev /dev/sg0 tapetype HP-CHANGER labelstr ^GH-((I)?(F)?)-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9]$ -- snip -- And for rotations: -- snip -- dumpcycle 1 weeks # the number of days in the normal dump cycle tapecycle 7 tapes # the number of tapes in rotation bumpsize 20 MB # minimum savings (threshold) to bump level 1 - 2 bumpdays 1 # minimum days at each level bumpmult 4 # threshold = bumpsize * (level-1)**bumpmult -- snip -- Now, can you please tell me why Amanda isn't flushing the backups? Should I set the tapecycle to, say, two? Excuse me if I'm being rude, but I'd much rather be told how to do things the right way instead of being told over and over that I'm doing it wrong.
RE: Tape changer question
if you spread the full backups out as AMANDA is inclined to do, you can probably go to runtapes 1 and she will make every effort to fill that tape with backup goodness every night. Since you have runtapes 6, she will try to fill six tapes every night. This doesn't sound like what you want. From what you've said, you have more than 7 tapes. Tapecycle should be the total number of tapes you have to use, plus maybe a couple spares. (I like to keep it at exactly the number I rotate, and have blanks ready to amlabel in case of trouble.) runspercycle should probably be 6 if you want to use all six tapes and change them once a week. dumpcycle is how often you want a guaranteed set of level 0 backups. One week is probably good for now. I think runspercycle * runtapes * dumpcycle (in days) == tapecycle is a good starting point. As for the flush, it didn't happen because AMANDA didn't find the number (runtapes) of empty tapes she was expecting. You can use amflush after changing runtapes to flush the backups. There is more info on-line at http://www.backupcentral.com/amanda.html. Amanda is configured to use my changer thusly: -- snip -- runtapes 6 # explained in WHATS.NEW tpchanger chg-zd-mtx # the tape-changer glue script, see TAPE.CHANGERS changerdev /dev/sg0 tapetype HP-CHANGER labelstr ^GH-((I)?(F)?)-[0-9][0-9]-[0-9]$ -- snip -- And for rotations: -- snip -- dumpcycle 1 weeks # the number of days in the normal dump cycle tapecycle 7 tapes # the number of tapes in rotation bumpsize 20 MB # minimum savings (threshold) to bump level 1 - 2 bumpdays 1 # minimum days at each level bumpmult 4 # threshold = bumpsize * (level-1)**bumpmult -- snip --
