Chris Karakas wrote:
> Simon Mayr wrote:
>
>> And hopefully the holding disk is not crashing at the same time as the
>> backup client crashes.
The point is losing the images in the holding disk and losing the
original data, which could have been avoided by NOT leaving them in the
holding disk, but flushing them earlier or doing normal backups to tape.
>
> Maybe this is not exactly what you meant, but I will report it anyway,
> just to make clear what can happen in this world...
>
> I *never* put a tape (or the right tape for that matter ;-)) in the
> drive when AMANDA starts. This way I force all images to be copied to
> the holding disk and remain there till next day. After AMANDA finishes,
> a trivial script copies the files from the holding disk to an MO disk. I
> use as many MO disks as tapes for this purpose. They have roughly the
> same capacity too, which comes handy. When I run amflush next day, I
> will have the images on both the tape and the MO disk :-)
>
> Some days ago I started the usual daily amflush operation. In the middle
> of this, a power outage occured :-(((.
Ooops.
> What happens in this case is that
> some of the files in the holding disk have already been transfered to
> tape, so they are not on the holding disk any more. The tape, on the
> other side, did not have its headers updated (not the AMANDA headers,
> but its low level headers - on my system this is done at the end of the
> flushing, after the rewind command is issued), so the drive will not
> find the transfered files on it. The result was that all the transfered
> images were lost :-(
You didn't say it, but I think the files you have backuped were ok.
So at least one of them (original & backup) has survived.
> My double net strategy saved me: I copied the images from the MO disk
> back to the holding disk and started amflush again :-)
And it would have double saved you, if due to the power outage the
originals were lost as well.
I am a lazy one, so I think I would automate this process a little bit.
In the crontab:
... /path/to/amdump sure_config && trivial_mo_script && echo -en
"all\ny\n" | /path/to/amflush flush_config && your_tape_rewind_command
with flush_config as your original config and sure_config the same, but
with a non-existant tape label for sure_config.
Simon
