On Sat, Mar 25, 2017 at 12:51:27AM +0900, Mark Fletcher wrote: > A while back I installed Amanda for backups. I have a pretty simple > setup at the moment which I may expand later. At the moment only one > machine, running Jessie, is backed up by Amanda. > > My main PC is both the Amanda server and the machine Amanda is backing > up. Recently I started to think about what would happen if I suffered a > catastrophic failure on this machine. Like if one of its SSDs died a > sudden death.
I'm going to suggest that amanda is not the best solution for you in this situation. > The backup "tapes" are virtual tapes on large-capacity disks in an > external USB3 drive cage. The recovery scenario is my PC takes a > nosedive but the contents of the external drive cage are fine. For > example, failure of one internal SSD in the PC containing most of the > operating system, /home etc. I'll take a wild guess and suggest that your SSD is 1 TB or smaller. Let's take a cost-effective 2TB spinning disk and partition it in 2 equal-sized chunks. On odd-numbered days, copy your entire SSD to partition 1 via dd. On weekends, copy your entire SSD to partition 2 via dd. Make sure you have a GRUB boot CD or USB stick available. Now you have an image available that's no more than 2 days old, and another which is no more than 7 days old. You should be able to recover a single file that you accidentally deleted by simply mounting the filesystem and copying it over. You can recover from a whole-SSD failure by booting with GRUB and then picking the right partition to boot from; when you have time, you can go buy a new SSD. For backing up other data stores you have in the system, amanda might well be the right choice. But for bare-metal recovery coupled with the more frequent oh-no-I-deleted-what? scenario, this will make your life much happier. -dsr-
