Thanks Jon! Your reply was very helpful indeed, especially on point number 2!
I do appreciate it. Regards, Joe Jon LaBadie wrote: > > On Fri, Jun 30, 2006 at 03:40:50AM -0700, Joe Donner (sent by Nabble.com) > wrote: >> >> Dear all, >> >> I think I may finally have cracked Amanda, but there are two things not >> quite clear to me: >> >> 1. When you do an amrecover, do you HAVE to rewind the tape first? This >> isn't a problem as such, I'm just wondering whether or not it should work > > I believe that amanda expects the tape used for recovery to be at the > start of the tape when you type "y" to continue. > >> that way, i.e. in amanda.conf I've got specified tapedev "/dev/nst0", >> which >> I understand to mean that you're using your tape drive as a no-rewind >> device >> (which I believe is sort of required by Amanda). > > Typically amanda rewinds the tape when it wants the tape at the beginning. > The above amrecover scenario may be an exception. > > The use of the no-rewind device is particularly important during tape > writing. Suppose amanda checks the tape label to see which tape is > in the drive, finds it is the correct tape, then closes the tape device. > If the tape auto-rewound on close, then when amanda started to write a > DLE, it would overwrite the tape label. > >> 2. I create a restore directory on the Amanda server, and then run >> amrecover as root from that directory to test doing restores from tape. >> At >> the moment I'm backing up directories from two hosts - the backup server >> itself and a client linux machine. I've noticed that when I restore >> stuff >> into the restore directory for one client, and subsequently do a restore >> to >> the same directory for a second client, then the first client's restored >> files get deleted just before the second client's files are restored. In >> other words, the restore directory is cleared of all its contents, and >> then >> the second restore runs. Is this intended behaviour? >> >> I would think that in practice you'd set up your clients so that you >> could >> restore data straight back to the client into a temporary directory, as >> opposed to doing restores to the backup server and then copying the data >> back to the client. > > What many mis-understand is that amrecover tries to get the directory > structure back to the state that existed at the date you specify for > the recovery (setdate). This doesn't mean just get the files that > were there then, but eliminate those that were not there. So when > you tried to recover a second, totally different client/DLE to the > same directory, it found things from the first client/DLE that did > not exist on the second client/DLE and it eliminated them. Recovering > each to its own separate empty directory is the way to go. > > When you recover directly to the original source tree, if you have > specified and set a date for a week ago, then you are going to be > eliminating those things created/modified since that date. > > > -- > Jon H. LaBadie [EMAIL PROTECTED] > JG Computing > 4455 Province Line Road (609) 252-0159 > Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax) > > -- View this message in context: http://www.nabble.com/amrecover%3A-rewinding-tape-and-restore-directory-tf1872516.html#a5121473 Sent from the Amanda - Users forum at Nabble.com.