Robert Brockway wrote: > [2] I use custom scripts and generate the md5sum of the hostname and take > a mod(days_in_month) of the first 5 characters of so. This produces a > pseudo-random distribution of the full backups across the month. Even > hosts that are named similarly will not necessarily have backups dates > near one another.
Interesting. I used to use my own custom scripts with dump (ufsdump and fssnap on Solaris). They were fairly sophisticated, allowed for a config file, worked to either a local or remote tape drive (over ssh), etc. Then a couple of years ago I switched to Amanda. Amanda is the only backup program I know that uses an intelligent planner to smooth the demand of full backups and various levels of incremental over the dump cycle (in my case a week). Rather than doing it randomly, though, it gets estimates of the size of the backups and will often achieve virtually equal tape (and network) usage each day if your specifications of backup units (systems, partitions, etc) provides enough granularity. It will also allow for parallel backups across multiple machines while avoiding doing two backups off the same spindle at the same time. Pretty cool. Your scripting is the first example I've seen of anyone trying to achieve a similar type of functionality. -- --------------- Chris Hoogendyk - O__ ---- Systems Administrator c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments (*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center ~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst <[email protected]> --------------- Erdös 4 _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list [email protected] http://lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
