Backup Central

Hello,

I need help on figuring out how to set up the dump cycle. The way I have previously done backups is a full dump on Friday night with incremental dumps Saturday through Thursday. I keep
the full dumps for the past 5 Fridays, and full dumps done on the last Friday of the previous 3 months. I short, I want to have the ability to restore a system to its previous state for the last 7
days, 5 weeks, and 3 months. I have an Powervault 120T/DLT7000 that holds 7 tapes. With compression off each tape holds about 35G. A full dump of all of my systems uncompressed
will fill nearly 6 tapes. I have plenty of tapes to swap out all tapes daily. Is there an easy way to set amanda.conf up to backup like this in only one configuration? Or do I need multiple
configs? I have already read the Amanda chapter of the O'Reilly Backup book. I would just like to see someone's example config who may be doing something similar to what I am trying to
do.

Thanks!

Jay
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On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 at 6:20am, Jay Ted wrote

I need help on figuring out how to set up the dump cycle. The way I have previously done backups is a full dump on Friday night with incremental dumps Saturday through Thursday. I keep
the full dumps for the past 5 Fridays, and full dumps done on the last Friday of the previous 3 months. I short, I want to have the ability to restore a system to its previous state for the last 7
days, 5 weeks, and 3 months. I have an Powervault 120T/DLT7000 that holds 7 tapes. With compression off each tape holds about 35G. A full dump of all of my systems uncompressed
will fill nearly 6 tapes. I have plenty of tapes to swap out all tapes daily. Is there an easy way to set amanda.conf up to backup like this in only one configuration? Or do I need multiple
configs? I have already read the Amanda chapter of the O'Reilly Backup book. I would just like to see someone's example config who may be doing something similar to what I am trying to
do.

First, please fix your line lengths. It makes it rather hard to read.

Reading the list archives, you'll see that forcing amanda into such a
fixed schedule is rather difficult, and somewhat frowned upon. Amanda
likes to do its own scheduling, with the goal of eqaulizing the night's
backups.

How many tapes do you have? If you have 7 days*12 weeks=84 tapes, you can
have 3 months worth of history to the daily level, with several level 0s
of each filesystem spread throughout your tapes. This is the easiest
option, requiring only one config. You could do, e.g., dumpcycle=12 days,
runspercycle=12, tapecycle=84.

If you have 7 days*5 weeks=35 tapes + 6 tapes*3 months=18 for a total of
53 tapes, you could do 5 weeks worth of history to the daily level plus a
separate config doing level 0s of everything once a month.

--
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University

On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 06:20:36AM +0800, Jay Ted wrote:
Hello,

I need help on figuring out how to set up the dump cycle. The way I
have previously done backups is a full dump on Friday night with
incremental dumps Saturday through Thursday. I keep
the full dumps for the past 5 Fridays, and full dumps done on the
last Friday of the previous 3 months. I short, I want to have the
ability to restore a system to its previous state for the last 7
days, 5 weeks, and 3 months. I have an Powervault 120T/DLT7000 that
holds 7 tapes. With compression off each tape holds about 35G. A
full dump of all of my systems uncompressed
will fill nearly 6 tapes. I have plenty of tapes to swap out all
tapes daily. Is there an easy way to set amanda.conf up to backup like
this in only one configuration? Or do I need multiple
configs? I have already read the Amanda chapter of the O'Reilly
Backup book. I would just like to see someone's example config who may
be doing something similar to what I am trying to do.

If you always do what you've always done,
you will always have what you've always had.

Consider trying the scheduling that amanda was designed to do.
Namely it decides which days each disklist entry (DLE, nominally
a file system) receives a level 0 and what incremental it gets
other days. The aim is to have the administrator give broad
specs, as in maximum time between level 0's for each DLE, and
let amanda worry about the specifics. When balanced, amanda
will be able to backup about the same amount of data (as in
tape usage) each dump run. No one hour backups Sat-Thur and
twelve hours on Fri, but two hours nightly.

I started out with a 1 week dumpcycle for everything and later
fine tuned some DLE's to only doing the level 0's, never any
incrementals as they never seem to change, others extended
to 2 weeks with incrementals too, and some shortened them to
3 days as they vary more rapidly and I wanted the level 0's
closer together.

jl
--
Jon H. LaBadie jon < at > jgcomp.com
JG Computing
4455 Province Line Road (609) 252-0159
Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)