Re: amvault with dropbox

2017-11-07 Thread Austin S. Hemmelgarn

On 2017-11-07 13:36, Ned Danieley wrote:

On Tue, Nov 07, 2017 at 01:29:34PM -0500, Austin S. Hemmelgarn wrote:

OK, so you're talking about functionally permanent archiving instead
of keeping old stuff around for a fixed multiple of the dump cycle.
If that's the case, you may be better off pulling the dumps off the
tapes using amfetchdump, and then uploading them for there.  That
use case could in theory be handled better with some extra code in
Amanda, but I don't know how well the lack of deletion would be
handled on Amanda's side.


yeah, I need to upload monthly full dumps to dropbox and keep them forever.
the monthly dumps are to vtapes, and I thought it would be neat if I could
then just transfer the vtapes to dropbox using amvault.

Strictly speaking, amvault doesn't transfer vtapes, it retapes the dumps 
on the vtapes to a new location.  While this sounds like a somewhat 
pointless distinction, it's actually pretty significant because it means 
you can use a different type of tapes for your secondary storage, with 
almost every single tapetype option different (which is extremely useful 
for multiple reasons).  That's actually part of the reason that it's a 
preferred alternative to mirroring tapes with the Amanda's RAIT device.


The issue here though is the 'keep it forever' bit.  If Amanda is given 
an automated tape changer (a library of vtapes is an automated changer), 
it assumes it can reuse the tapes as it sees fit.  I think there's a 
config option that lets you change that, but once you do that, you need 
to keep adding tapes (or vtapes) to the library, which can get out of 
hand really quickly (especially if you don't plan ahead when deciding on 
how things will get labeled).


One option for this though, if you can afford to use something other 
than Dropbox, would be to use the Amazon S3 support to store your data 
in Amazon Glacier storage (which is insanely cheap at about 0.07 USD per 
TB of storage), and enable versioning (so that wen a 'tape' gets 
overwritten, the old version gets kept around) and keep old versions 
forever.  If you're interested in doing this, I can write up 
instructions for how to get things set up with Amazon to do this (We 
actually do something very similar for off-site backups where I work, 
just without Glacier or versioning (but those are easy to set up)).


Re: amvault with dropbox

2017-11-07 Thread Ned Danieley
On Tue, Nov 07, 2017 at 01:29:34PM -0500, Austin S. Hemmelgarn wrote:
> OK, so you're talking about functionally permanent archiving instead
> of keeping old stuff around for a fixed multiple of the dump cycle.
> If that's the case, you may be better off pulling the dumps off the
> tapes using amfetchdump, and then uploading them for there.  That
> use case could in theory be handled better with some extra code in
> Amanda, but I don't know how well the lack of deletion would be
> handled on Amanda's side.

yeah, I need to upload monthly full dumps to dropbox and keep them forever.
the monthly dumps are to vtapes, and I thought it would be neat if I could
then just transfer the vtapes to dropbox using amvault.

-- 
Ned Danieley ([email protected])
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Box 90281, Duke University
Durham, NC  27708   (919) 660-5111

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-02-11/


Re: amvault with dropbox

2017-11-07 Thread Austin S. Hemmelgarn

On 2017-11-07 13:19, Ned Danieley wrote:

On Tue, Nov 07, 2017 at 01:11:43PM -0500, Austin S. Hemmelgarn wrote:

On 2017-11-07 11:55, Ned Danieley wrote:


we use a dropbox business account to archive our data, and I was interested
in trying to use amvault to transfer my amanda backups there. however, it
seems that there is a fair amount of work that would have to be done to the
code base to make that happen, work that is probably beyond my ability.

are any plans to include dropbox access in future versions?


You can do this already without needing any new code.  Just
configure a virtual tape library inside a Dropbox synced directory,
set that as a vaulting location, and recursively add the necessary
read permissions to the directory after each amvault run.


I guess that would work, although I'd have to set up selective sync so I
could remove the files locally without removing them from dropbox. thanks
for the suggestion; I'll give it a try.

OK, so you're talking about functionally permanent archiving instead of 
keeping old stuff around for a fixed multiple of the dump cycle.  If 
that's the case, you may be better off pulling the dumps off the tapes 
using amfetchdump, and then uploading them for there.  That use case 
could in theory be handled better with some extra code in Amanda, but I 
don't know how well the lack of deletion would be handled on Amanda's side.


Re: amvault with dropbox

2017-11-07 Thread Ned Danieley
On Tue, Nov 07, 2017 at 01:11:43PM -0500, Austin S. Hemmelgarn wrote:
> On 2017-11-07 11:55, Ned Danieley wrote:
> >
> >we use a dropbox business account to archive our data, and I was interested
> >in trying to use amvault to transfer my amanda backups there. however, it
> >seems that there is a fair amount of work that would have to be done to the
> >code base to make that happen, work that is probably beyond my ability.
> >
> >are any plans to include dropbox access in future versions?
> >
> You can do this already without needing any new code.  Just
> configure a virtual tape library inside a Dropbox synced directory,
> set that as a vaulting location, and recursively add the necessary
> read permissions to the directory after each amvault run.

I guess that would work, although I'd have to set up selective sync so I
could remove the files locally without removing them from dropbox. thanks
for the suggestion; I'll give it a try.

-- 
Ned Danieley ([email protected])
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Box 90281, Duke University
Durham, NC  27708   (919) 660-5111

http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2012-02-11/


Re: amvault with dropbox

2017-11-07 Thread Austin S. Hemmelgarn

On 2017-11-07 11:55, Ned Danieley wrote:


we use a dropbox business account to archive our data, and I was interested
in trying to use amvault to transfer my amanda backups there. however, it
seems that there is a fair amount of work that would have to be done to the
code base to make that happen, work that is probably beyond my ability.

are any plans to include dropbox access in future versions?

You can do this already without needing any new code.  Just configure a 
virtual tape library inside a Dropbox synced directory, set that as a 
vaulting location, and recursively add the necessary read permissions to 
the directory after each amvault run.