On Mon, Jul 18, 2005 at 04:01:25PM -0400, Jon LaBadie wrote: > > > The amrestore command is getting the file in uncompressed format > > > even if it was compressed. If you want to transfer the compressed > > > form I think you could add the -r option. > > I think it's -c actually and the manpage is a bit ambiguous on the > > actual workings it. From the phrasing I'd expect the files to be > > uncompressed if necessary and then recompressed if requested using -c. > > That would mean processing the whole archive twice - first uncompressing > > then recompressing. > It also says the -r options causes the output to be exactly as on "tape". > Thus it 'should' avoid the double processing.
Right. But ;) it goes on to say that this also includes amdump headers. What good would that do? I wouldn't be able to extract it using the original archive/dump program, would I? Or could I feed it to amrecover as implied below? > > > Using amrecover might be possible. I think when you specify to > > > extract a directory it extracts recursively anything under that > > > directory. So adding "/" or "." to the extract list (I forget the > > > semantics) might make recovery of the entire dump possible using > > > amrecover. > > Problem is: amrecover always restores to a directory on the backup > > server, doesn't it? So I'd have to NFS-mount some directory from the > > actual target machine to have the data go where I need it. If I want to > > restore the whole box anyway I find the archives more flexible. > Someone will correct me if I'm wrong. The backup program may not be > available on the tapehost. The client may have been some other > architecture or OS. I'm pretty certain that amrecover was made to > run on a remote client, transfer the dump using amrestore (and its > "-r" option) on the tapehost, and do the extraction on the client. Ah, but that closes the circle: I wanted to know how to extract stuff from virtual tapes using amrestore in the first place. Once I know that I'm quite happy to do amrestore -p | ssh box cat/tar/whatever. But you peeked my interest: How do I feed the raw amdump file to amrecover to extract individual files on the client? Wouldn't it need the index from the server? I'm confused. ;) Ah, reading the man page and RTFMing the documentation helps a bit - I think I get it now. So I just run amrecover on the box to be restored and it requests the index from the index server, lets me select the files I want and then requests those *over the network* as well, but from the tape host. That, of course, would be a viable alternative to extracting the archives using amrestore. But how efficient/fast is that for whole disks? The documentation on www.amanda.org seems to focus on amrestore for whole disks and advertises amrecover for individual files. -- Michael Sauced it has to be, sauced!