Backup Central

Hi All,

I installed amanda on my local network and it's doing fine. I've got 2
configs, one daily which backups to a set of 5 vtapes of 700mb each to
burn to cdr, and one weekly full which backups to a set of 250 vtapes of
4GB each to burn to DVD.
The weekly-dvd config has these settings in it:
dumpcycle 0
#runspercycle 4

This only creates full backups of the files. I wonder however, I do not
have the space for all these 250 vtapes, could I delete them after
backing up?
I was thinking of deleting only the data in these dirs, which if I'm not
mistaken let's me reuse these tapes whenever I get close to nr.250 (with
amadmin reuse tapelabels), while only using the space of do many I have
room for.

Thanks,
Kind regards,
Axel

On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 01:29:27PM +0200, Axel Scheepers (thuis) wrote:
I installed amanda on my local network and it's doing fine. I've got 2
configs, one daily which backups to a set of 5 vtapes of 700mb each to
burn to cdr, and one weekly full which backups to a set of 250 vtapes of
4GB each to burn to DVD.

OK... but a TB of backups on vtapes sounds like rather a lot to me....

The weekly-dvd config has these settings in it:
dumpcycle 0
#runspercycle 4

Ummm... the "#" indicates a comment line in amanda.conf.

This only creates full backups of the files. I wonder however, I do not
have the space for all these 250 vtapes, could I delete them after
backing up?

??!?

Well, it's your data, and your config; you can destroy your backups &
lie to amanda if you want to. I rather doubt that this will make your
life easier, though.

I was thinking of deleting only the data in these dirs, which if I'm not
mistaken let's me reuse these tapes whenever I get close to nr.250 (with
amadmin reuse tapelabels), while only using the space of do many I have
room for.

I think you are likely to be a lot better off telling amanda the truth
about how many backups to remember. At least that way, she's less
likely to tell someone that in order to restore certain data, yshe needs
to read data from a backup that you have destroyed. I'd think that
would be fairly frustrating for all concerned. I certainly would not do
that intentionally, and I hope I wouldn't do it accdentally, either.

Peace,
david
--
David H. Wolfskill david < at > egation.com

Axel Scheepers (thuis) wrote:

I installed amanda on my local network and it's doing fine. I've got 2
configs, one daily which backups to a set of 5 vtapes of 700mb each to
burn to cdr, and one weekly full which backups to a set of 250 vtapes of
4GB each to burn to DVD.
The weekly-dvd config has these settings in it:
dumpcycle 0
#runspercycle 4

This only creates full backups of the files. I wonder however, I do not
have the space for all these 250 vtapes, could I delete them after
backing up?

I assume you did burn them to DVD first. In that case, yes.
It's best to keep the directory named "slotXXX" on disk. You may create
a small file in that directory e.g. "on-DVD", with datestamp and
coordinates of the DVD etc to remember that you did burn that directory
to DVD.

After you have erased the directory, and create the little reminder
file, amanda will show this slot as containing "not an amanda tape".

If you need to restore something from that backup, you may first locate
the DVD and put the contents back, or you can even symlink the "slotXXX"
directory to the mount point of the DVD.


--
Paul Bijnens, Xplanation Tel +32 16 397.511
Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUM Fax +32 16 397.512
http://www.xplanation.com/ email: Paul.Bijnens < at > xplanation.com
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Paul Bijnens wrote:

I assume you did burn them to DVD first. In that case, yes.
It's best to keep the directory named "slotXXX" on disk. You may create
a small file in that directory e.g. "on-DVD", with datestamp and
coordinates of the DVD etc to remember that you did burn that directory
to DVD.

After you have erased the directory, and create the little reminder
file, amanda will show this slot as containing "not an amanda tape".

If you need to restore something from that backup, you may first locate
the DVD and put the contents back, or you can even symlink the "slotXXX"
directory to the mount point of the DVD.


That's sort of how I thought about it, except I wasn't sure if it was ok
to delete the labels too. For restoring I'm used to using 'dd
if=dumpfile bs=32k skip=1 | [restore|tar]' after I searched for it with
amdadmin conf find host dir. I mostly backup with tar for this reason
too, it's easy to generate winzip compatible archives for the windoze
boxes this way. (so the user can restore his/her data without assistence).

Thanks for the info,
Kind regards,
Axel