Backup Central

Hi all,
I've been landed with the problem of backing up a large volume
(~350Gb) containing home directories with a DDS3 tape drive. Apart from
not really being up to the job, I have the following problem - here is
an artists impression of my directoery structure:

/homes
./students
./year10
./1234 (a student's homedir)
./1235 ...etc
./year11
./3456
./3457 ...etc
./staff
./fbloggs (a staff member's home directory)
./gbloggs

The problem is that each year directory is too large to fit on one tape.
What I would like to do is subdivide a directory (eg year10) into
subsets, but not have to specify every user's homedir in the disklist.

does anyone have any ideas how this could be done? Or can you run a
single backup run over several tapes (without an autochanger?)

The most promising method I have found so far should back up all user
directories within a year group ending in 0 or 1 as one entry in
disklist, 2 or 3 as another and so on. This breaks each year's directory
into 5 separate jobs. The problem with this is that amandad seems to
have trouble handling requests for estimates of ~30 different disklist
entries

thanks for any help

Jim Potter
Brislington School
Bristol, UK

Jim Potter wrote:

The most promising method I have found so far should back up all user
directories within a year group ending in 0 or 1 as one entry in
disklist, 2 or 3 as another and so on. This breaks each year's directory
into 5 separate jobs. The problem with this is that amandad seems to
have trouble handling requests for estimates of ~30 different disklist
entries

That's indeed that normal way. Look in docs/disklist example
file for the last example.

What exacly is the problem with too many estimates? Timeout?
(look for etimeout)
udp dgram too long? (use a recent snaphot, unless you're using HPUX,
where there is some problem in the OS handing large UDP dgarm)

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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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