On Tue, 2002-11-12 at 14:43, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > > "Carl D. Blake" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >On Tue, 2002-11-12 at 10:56, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > >> > >> > >> "Carl D. Blake" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > >> >I'm trying to setup an AMANDA backup system with the following > >> >characteristics: > >> > Full backup every Wednesday on a different weekly tape > >> > Differential backup on Thurday, Friday, Monday, and Tuesday > >> > Full backup on the last Wednesday of each month which is then > >> > archived for a year. > >> > >> Comments or suggestions? You are trying to swim upstream. > >> > >> Tommy McGuire > >Could you explain what you mean by this? What is a better way to handle > >this? I would prefer to use amanda the way it was meant to be used > >rather than try to force her into some peculiar mode. > > Amanda is really very good at set-it-and-forget-it backups: you tell it > what you want to back up, how often you want a full backup, and how many > tapes to use. It figures out when to do what level of backup to spread > out your backups across the schedule. > > For example, we have two configurations. The daily config, which is run > 6 nights per week, is set to do a full backup of each filesystem every > two weeks, incrementals in between, and to update the equivalent of > /etc/dumpdates with when it does what level. The archive config, which > runs once a week, doesn't do incremental backups, doesn't record what > it does, and does a full backup of each filesystem once a month. This > configuration is very similar to what is described above except that > it doesn't mention what day of the week or month things are supposed to > happen. > This sounds similar to what I want to do with our backups. I've been trying to get used to the idea of not knowing when a full backup or an incremental backup occurs. This is why I was asking for comments and suggestions.
> Do I know what level the daily config is doing for a particular > filesystem on a given day? Not really. Do I know what week a > particular filesystem will get archived? Nope. Do I care? No. When > we have to restore something, Amanda tells us what tapes to get it off > of. What does it get us? Back before Amanda, when we had a schedule > somewhat like that above, the archive run once a month was taking > between two and three days. Some of the dailys wanted several tapes > and others less than half of one. This was a while back; that kind of > config wouldn't work for us at all now. > > When you try to tell Amanda to do a full backup every Wednesday, or to > do a full backup of everything the last Wednesday of the month, you are > trying to manually do something that Amanda was designed to automate. > You're not using Amanda's power and you're going have to do perverted > things to the configuration to get it to work at all, which it probably > won't. You are swimming upstream, and it would be easier to write your > own backup scripts to follow your schedule. If you need Amanda's power, > you have to let it handle the scheduling. > I would prefer to let amanda handle the scheduling. I'm just having trouble figuring out a reasonable configuration where I can get weekly full backups as well as monthly (or every 4 weeks) full backups that I can archive for a year. You mention that your archive config runs once a week and does monthly backups for each filesystem. Is that configuration something like: dumpcycle 0 runspercycle 4 tapecycle 52 where dumpcycle 0 tells amanda to perform full backups every time, runspercycle 4 tells amanda to put the full backups on 4 tapes, and tapecycle 52 provides enough tapes for a year? Also, how many tapes do you use for your daily config? Is it enough to cover an entire month? > Tommy McGuire -- Carl D. Blake Director of Engineering Boeckeler Instruments, Inc. 4650 S. Butterfield Dr. Tucson, AZ 85714 Phone: 520-745-0001 FAX: 520-745-0004 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] .com