Re: advantages of amanda over ADSM or other backup utilities?
Hai Jon: I haven't compared AMANDA with other backup utilities extensively. The main reason is - People in our university are using ADSM. I have been using AMANDA for sometime on my machine. I need to have a nice reason for my university for switching over to AMANDA. Few nice reasons could be it's a freebie, works well on heterogeneous systems, open source, etc. But I am also looking for advantages of Amanda over ADSM, which is a licensed one. Some reasons technically.. . about why we should prefer Amanda over ADSM or in fact any other utility. There are also other freebies like Amanda too. Regards, Nitesh On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 10:36:33AM +0530, Nitesh Kumar A. wrote: > > I am yet to understand the advantages of AMANDA over other backup > utilities like ADSM, etc other than AMANDA being a freebie? > > May I know some of the reasons why AMANDA edges over other traditional > Unix backup utilities. stable does what it claims source available well supported good, unique scheduling module networked scales well from a single system to moderatly large installations >From your "yet to understand", I assume you have compared amanda to other traditional unix backup utilities. May we know some of your comparison results? Or the features you find attractive in other traditional unix backup utilities? -- Jon H. LaBadie [EMAIL PROTECTED] JG Computing 4455 Province Line Road(609) 252-0159 Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)
advantages of amanda over ADSM or other backup utilities?
Hai all: I am yet to understand the advantages of AMANDA over other backup utilities like ADSM, etc other than AMANDA being a freebie? May I know some of the reasons why AMANDA edges over other traditional Unix backup utilities. Thanking you Regards, Nitesh
Re: incremental backup !!
Hai Gene: I am sorry for the personal mail. Actually, felt that the queries I have might be too trivial and might bother others. So, ... . Now I understand that there are newbies like me too. Anyway, I will write to the group only. ThanQ and regards, Nitesh > One (or more) of us will try and help you get your system going, and > we'ed like it if you stick around and describe for the next newbie > how it was you got your system running the way you'd like it to, > within the design constraints of amanda.
Re: incremental backup !!
Hello Chan: If I run ./amdump, it is writing into the tape drive. So I never used ./amflush. What do I need to do for the level 0 backup to be written to the tape and then all the level 1 backups to stay on the holding disk for a week before they are flushed to the tape on the weekend? It would be good enough if only the last level 1 is flushed to the tape. Regards, Nitesh > If you have lots of holding disk space you can dump everything > to holding disk, then just write lev 0's to tape. Keep the lev 1's > on disk until the end of the week, then flush the end of week lev 1's > to tape and delete the others.
Re: incremental backup !!
Hai Joshua: Since level 1 backups everything since the last backup, that is level 0, we will get replication of files (redundancy) irrespective of whether the files are modified or not in the subsequent backups on the rest of the days. In the sense on saturday, we will get files, a, b, c, d and e too. So tuesday: a, b wed: a, b, c thu: a, b, c, d and so on. (irrespective of whether the files are modified or not. this will result in redundancy). is there some mechanism to minimize it? y waste the tape.. . true, i will go through the website too. it might be very useful indeed. > Amanda does not append to tapes -- you'll need to change tapes each day. so when will the tape drive1 get a chance to be overwritten? do we need to relabel it again? thanQ and regards, nitesh On Tue, 26 Nov 2002 at 7:30pm, Nitesh Kumar A. wrote > I am really excited to know more about AMANDA now. > > What I understand is that, first amanda will take a level 0 backup (full > backup) and then for the following days, it will take level 1. Usually. If the level 1s get too big, it may "bump" them to 2s or higher. > If suppose, amanda takes level 0 on sunday and then level 1, with respect > to 0 on mon/tue/wed/thu/fri/sat. > > Now I have files named a, b, c, d, e, etc on my filesystem. I have the > full backup on sunday. > > File "a" is modified on monday, so the level 1 backup on monday will just > have file "a". > > File "b" is modified on tuesday, so the backup on tuesday will have just > file "b" but not file "a" due to just level 1 backup. That's incorrect. A level 1 backs up everything changed since the last level 0. So Tuesday night's backup will have "a" and "b". > At some point of time, if I want to backup all the files, then I have to > contact all the tape drives. Is this the case? Or will amanda tell me on > which tape drives are these files located? How do I search for a > particular file in the backup? The program "amrecover" offers a ftp-like interface to the backups. You tell it what files you want (and from which data), and it'll tell you what tapes you need. > So if just file "a" is written into the tape drive1, how can we use the > rest of the space on the tapedrive1? Amanda does not append to tapes -- you'll need to change tapes each day. For more, please go read the amanda chater from "Unix Backup & Recovery", available at <http://www.backupcentral.com/amanda.html> as well as the docs in the amanda tarball. They'll explain a lot of these basic concepts. -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University
Re: incremental backup !!
Hai Dieter: Does it not spell like the data is replicated? If on monday, files a, b, c, d, e are modified and no files are modified for the rest of the week, then from monday through friday, all the tape drives seem to have the same files. Some mechanism to avaoid this? Regards, Nitesh Hello Nitesh, Amanda will take file a and b on tuesday and a,b,c on wednesday, thursday,... on level 1 backup since level one is incremental ONLY to the last level 0, not to other level 1's So you only have to take the last level 1 tape and the last level 0 tape. *** * Dr. Dieter Meinert * * Germany * ***
Re: incremental backup !!
Hai Joshua: I am really excited to know more about AMANDA now. What I understand is that, first amanda will take a level 0 backup (full backup) and then for the following days, it will take level 1. If suppose, amanda takes level 0 on sunday and then level 1, with respect to 0 on mon/tue/wed/thu/fri/sat. Now I have files named a, b, c, d, e, etc on my filesystem. I have the full backup on sunday. File "a" is modified on monday, so the level 1 backup on monday will just have file "a". File "b" is modified on tuesday, so the backup on tuesday will have just file "b" but not file "a" due to just level 1 backup. File "c" and file "a" are modified on wednesday, so that day's backup will have files "a" and "c". At some point of time, if I want to backup all the files, then I have to contact all the tape drives. Is this the case? Or will amanda tell me on which tape drives are these files located? How do I search for a particular file in the backup? So if just file "a" is written into the tape drive1, how can we use the rest of the space on the tapedrive1? Guess, these might be too trivial, but .. . Regards, Nitesh On Tuesday 26 November 2002 07:15 pm, you wrote: > On Tue, 26 Nov 2002 at 6:53pm, Nitesh Kumar A. wrote > > > Nice to receive an instant response from you. > > CCed back to the list so all can see. > > > When we schedule amanda to do the backup for us. What levels of backup > > does it do daily/monthly? > > > > I mean, it backups some data today. Similar way it does tomorrow. Now > > what is the difference between these two data? > > Amanda tends to run mostly level 0s and 1s. It'll "bump" backups to level > 2 (or higher) if something gets too big and it needs to save space (and > you can control the bump threshhold). As I said below, the goal is for > each night's backups to be about the same size. A nice benefit of this > scheme is that you generally will only need two tapes to do a full restore > of a filesystem. > > > Now if suppose I want to backup a file, say "xyz" from the tape, where > > will it search for the file? Will it search for today's or tomorrow's? > > Ah, here it gest nicer. You can specify the date from which you want file > xyz. Want yesterday's version? Ask for it. Want last week's version as > well? Ask for that too. How far back you can go depends, of course, on > your dumpcycle and tapecycle, but that's the general idea.
incremental backup !!
Hai: I need some advice on this. I get confused with dumpcycles, etc. I need one full backup on the 1st day of every month. And then from sunday to saturday through the entire month, I need to take incremental backup. How do I take it? I mean incremental backup from the 1st day of every month to the last day of the month. Or essentially, like the towers of hanoi: sun mon tue wed thu fri sat sun 0 3 2 5 4 7 6 9/1 Is it feasible to take it this way? Else, suggest some decent solution for my backups. Regards, Nitesh
amrestore and amrecover error !!
Hai: I have the following errors, while using amrestore and amrecover. I am not able to get through. I have uninstalled and reconfigured amanda again, but .. . I am running, AiX on ibm machine. ibms2 is the hostname and hd3 is the drive i wanted to take the backup. # ./amrecover AMRECOVER Version 2.4.2p2. Contacting server on ibm580_2 ... 220 ibm580_2 AMANDA index server (2.4.2p2) ready. 200 Access OK Setting restore date to today (2002-11-26) 200 Working date set to 2002-11-26. 200 Working date set to 2002-11-26. amrecover: Unexpected server end of file This is the error with amrestore. # ./amrestore -p /dev/rmt0.1 ibms2 hd3|restore -ivbf 2 - Cluster size 0 is too small; increased to 8. Please mount volume 1 on /dev/rfd0. Press the Enter key to continue. amrestore: 0: skipping start of tape: date 20021125 label DailySet10 amrestore: 1: skipping ibms2.hd4.20021125.0 amrestore: 2: restoring ibms2.hd3.20021125.1 restore: 0511-158 Cannot open /dev/rfd0: The device is not ready for operation. Please mount volume 1 on /dev/rfd0. Press the Enter key to continue. restore: 0511-158 Cannot open /dev/rfd0: The device is not ready for operation. Please mount volume 1 on /dev/rfd0. Press the Enter key to continue. restore: 0511-158 Cannot open /dev/rfd0: The device is not ready for operation. Please mount volume 1 on /dev/rfd0. Press the Enter key to continue. restore: 0511-158 Cannot open /dev/rfd0: The device is not ready for operation. Please mount volume 1 on /dev/rfd0. Press the Enter key to continue. I am not able to find out where has this rfd0 come from. My tape drive is rmt0.1. Thanking you. Regards, Nitesh
writing into a tape !!
Sir: I am new to amanda. I have installed it on my machine which is running AiX last week. My system description: 1. Using amanda-2.4.2p2 on AiX 2. I have followed the instructions given in README, INSTALL, docs/* files 3. I am not getting any errors when I run $ ./amcheck -m confname; ./amdump confname. I guess it is dumping something into the holding disk. The file in the holding disk is found to be ibms2.hd4.1. Is this the dump? 4. When I open the file, it has some special characters. 5. But when I say, $ ./amflush -f confname, it is not writing anything to the tape (/dev/rmt0). I have some other information in the tape drive. Will it not write to the tape or how can I write into it. 6. If I say, $ tar -tvf /dev/rmt0, I sould see the old files in the tape. 7. Also please help me, how to take backups of a single directory onto the tape/other directory in the machine at some other location. Thanking you very much in advance. Please help me. Regards, Nitesh
