Have you considered doing an rsync of your amanda home directory and /var/amanda directories to another disk on another machine.
You could set this up to run after you back is complete. From: owner-amanda-us...@amanda.org [mailto:owner-amanda-us...@amanda.org] On Behalf Of Alden Timme Sent: Monday, August 22, 2011 2:59 PM To: amanda-users@amanda.org Subject: Re: Recovering Metadata from Tape? Great! Thanks for the responses - sorry I didn't see the archived conversations. Alden 2011/8/22 gene heskett <ghesk...@wdtv.com<mailto:ghesk...@wdtv.com>> On Monday, August 22, 2011 02:22:01 PM Alden Timme did opine: > Hi all, > > I am using a tape library to do my Amanda backups, but I have run into > one issue - restoring my Amanda system in the case that my Amanda > server goes down. > > Even if I have my amanda.conf file, there is a lot of metadata I need to > be able to run a successful amrestore or amrecover. My questions are > > (1) What files do I need exactly? > > (2) How do I retrieve/recover all of those files from the tapes > themselves? > > For (1), I think I need at least > * $CONFIGDIR/$config/amanda.conf > * $CONFIGDIR/$config/tapelist > * $PREFIX/var/amanda/chg-robot-dev-sg4 (file that holds my current tape > changer's status) > * infofile > * indexdir > > but for (2) I don't know how to recover all those files. > > I have been able to do a little bit of the retrieval/recovery with > amtape update, but that doesn't get me everything I need to use > amrestore/amrecover effectively. > > I've looked around a lot in the forums/archives/how-tos but haven't > found an answer for this question - which I assume is a fairly common > issue. Apologies if I simply haven't found the documentation - in that > case a link would be sufficient :) > > Thanks in advance! > Alden This is one of those 'bare metal' questions, and there have been 2 or 3 offerings in that regard, I rather like my own solution to that problem. It is a wrapper script that depends on your having a tape descriptor with a 500 meg and up, cushion so that amanda will never fill the tape, but will leave a bit of room for the wrapper scripts files. The wrapper script adds to the end of the tape, a tarball of the current configuration tree, and a tarball of the database tree. It looks something like this on a vtape: [root@coyote gene]# ls -l /amandatapes/Dailys/slot20 total 27352256 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 32768 Aug 22 00:50 00000.Dailys-20 -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 25698360714 Aug 22 01:05 00001.coyote._home.0 [... long dle list of files] -rw------- 1 amanda amanda 856391680 Aug 22 01:16 00040.coyote._usr_share.0 -rw-r--r-- 1 amanda amanda 102400 Aug 22 02:53 configuration.tar -rw-r--r-- 1 amanda amanda 193904640 Aug 22 02:53 indices.tar The version available isn't exactly the latest, but a good scripter can adjust to suit. Google for GenesAmandaHelper-0.6. I probably need to repack it and put in on my web page. I will freely admit its a poor bash hack, but I have been using it here for several years now. I have assumed that disaster recovery is a new install and that you've enough tools available in that install to recover from the tape directly, dd, tar and gzip cover that. Assume then that you use these tools to recover the indices.tar and place its contents where they now reside, as step one. Step 2 would be to recover, again using dd and tar, the configuration.tar file and put it where it resided before the crash. Step 3 then is to recover the user tree where amanda was built and installed from, in my case the /home tree since I build and install amanda as the user amanda. You will need to adduser, and groupadd, the user who ran amanda, unpack these files to tmp and do as root, a chown -R on those two trees in /tmp before the wholesale copying is done. In my case I would cd to /home/amanda/amanda-version and do a "make install". At that point, mkdir your holding disk area and chown it so amanda can use it. You should then have an amanda install that passes an amcheck $configname, as that amanda user, or get errors telling you what is missing yet. Once that's done, amrecover should let you recover the rest of your data. I have done that several times here & there has always been something I forget since at my years I really don't remember some of the details. But this really does help me... Cheers, gene -- "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Being a BALD HERO is almost as FESTIVE as a TATTOOED KNOCKWURST.
