Re: Labeling tapes with "day of the week", is not a good practice
On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 01:55:23PM +0100, Ranveer Attalia wrote: > > Hi > > First thanks to everyone that helped me with my nightmare restore last > week. I've managed to get the system disk up and running now so things > are little calmer. Trying to understand the errors I recieved during the > restore and (with the ... > system disk restore, I eventually managed to get all the data off) > Glad you were able to get back running. > Gavin mentioned that we shouldnt be using "day of the week" > tape labels. Why is this? Are the results fatal if we do? The labels serve two masters, you and amanda. Your label is probably on the outside of the tape, amanda's is on the tape itself. So actually they don't even have to match. Its a mess though if they don't. :( Amanda wants her tapes in order, doesn't matter about the label. The order could be 1,2,3 or 293,482,111 or mon,tue,wed, or huey,dewey,louie. Doesn't matter to amanda. As long as she sees them in the same order the next time. You on the other hand think a tape labeled 3 must follow a tape labeled 2 (or tuesday must follow monday). And you may feel that a tape labeled tuesday must be used on tuesday. Silly you. :)) It has been the collective experience of amanda users that any scheme to order the tapes for your purposes (not amanda's) will get out of order. Tapes will be added, go bad and be replaced. Computers will fail and a dump will be missed or someone will forget to change the tapes or a dump that normally takes 3 tapes one day will take 2 or 4. So generally it is recommended that you keep your labeling simple and don't concern yourself if eventually they don't follow a human-based logical order. > > All of our Daily and Weekly tapes are labelled with the day of the week. > Is there any easy way that we can revert back to the Amanda way of > labelling the tapes? If it is possible and we can revert, would we still > beable to restore off the "day of the week" tapes that we have up until > now if we ever need to? If you can mentally deal with using tuesdays tape on friday, they don't "have to be" relabelled. One detail-intensive way to redo them is to relabel them as they are about to be reused. Use the "-f" option of amlabel to overwrite the current label. Amanda will consider the tape to be a "new" tape and it will always use a new tape even if it is beyond the number of tapes in the tapecycle. To enforce this, you could mark each tape as "no-reuse". Then amanda will require a "new" tape each run. Someone correct me if I am wrong, but I believe this will preserve the index for those tapes. Of course, after relabeling and reusing the tape you will want to remove the tape from the database rather than just listing it as "no-reuse" (amrmtape). HTH -- Jon H. LaBadie [EMAIL PROTECTED] JG Computing 4455 Province Line Road(609) 252-0159 Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)
Re: Labeling tapes with "day of the week", is not a good practice
-BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE- Hash: SHA1 On Tuesday, 31.08.2004 at 13:55 +0100, Ranveer Attalia wrote: > All of our Daily and Weekly tapes are labelled with the day of the > week. Is there any easy way that we can revert back to the Amanda way > of labelling the tapes? If it is possible and we can revert, would we > still beable to restore off the "day of the week" tapes that we have > up until now if we ever need to? You can migrate your currently named tapes from your 'daily' names to some other, 'non-daily' names. I have done this! You do this by gradually changing the names of tapes as you go through your normal backup cycle. We have 20 tapes and it took 20 days to make all these changes. For instance, say you want to change from Blah-Monday-1, Blah-Tuesday-1 etc. to Blah-001, Blah-002 etc. You do this: 1. Change the regular expression in amanda.conf to recognize *both* the old and the new tape names. This is the 'trick' to making this work. 2. When a tape is due for re-use, just before use, you relabel it according to the new scheme. You then 'amrmtape' the old name. 3. Do this each day for your entire tapecycle. After $TAPECYCLE days, all your tapes will be labelled with the new scheme and you can change the label regexp in amanda.conf to just recognize the new labels. At all times, you are able to restore for any tape, as normal, whether named new or old. Dave. - -- Dave Ewart [EMAIL PROTECTED] Computing Manager, Epidemiology Unit, Oxford Cancer Research UK PGP: CC70 1883 BD92 E665 B840 118B 6E94 2CFD 694D E370 -BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (GNU/Linux) iD8DBQFBNHk0bpQs/WlN43ARAgJZAJ9m4HIzVqJ3bD/zva5E9Yy8MpxS+gCg8Yyy 25RThkVU8KD6sVDe/FRvZAc= =0DDO -END PGP SIGNATURE-
Labeling tapes with "day of the week", is not a good practice
Hi First thanks to everyone that helped me with my nightmare restore last week. I've managed to get the system disk up and running now so things are little calmer. Trying to understand the errors I recieved during the restore and Gavin mentioned that we shouldnt be using "day of the week" tape labels. Why is this? Are the results fatal if we do? (with the system disk restore, I eventually managed to get all the data off) All of our Daily and Weekly tapes are labelled with the day of the week. Is there any easy way that we can revert back to the Amanda way of labelling the tapes? If it is possible and we can revert, would we still beable to restore off the "day of the week" tapes that we have up until now if we ever need to? Thanks - Ranveer -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Behalf Of Paul Bijnens Sent: 24 August 2004 14:51 To: Ranveer Attalia Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Anyone please reply! System Disk recovery - UNKNOWN file. amrecover: Cant read file header Ranveer Attalia wrote: > I am trying to test restore before I run a system disk recover from > amanda server to my client machine. > The restore file is any one from /opt onto the client telhp6 onto a > /scratch/restored directory but its giving me file header errors... > I cannot understand why though because it looks as if it backed up > fine and its displaying the tape labels with no problem on the amanda server: > Please can someone help > > Thanks > > - Ranveer > > $ amtape Weekly show > amtape: scanning all 7 slots in tape-changer rack: > slot 1: date 20040822 label Fri3.1 > slot 2: date 20040820 label Fri3.2 > amtape: could not load slot source: Element Address 8 is Empty Labeling tapes with "day of the week", is not a good practice, just in case you didn't read the earlier warnings about this issue. Tertio Telecoms (www.telco-tertio.com) Head Office: One Angel Square Torrens Street London EC1V 1PL Tel: +44 (0)20 7843 4000 - Fax: +44 (0)20 7843 4001 Bath Office: Riverside Buildings 108 Walcot Street Bath BA1 5BG Tel: +44 (0)1225 478000 - Fax: +44 (0)1225 478001 Munich Office: Freisinger Strasse 10, 85737 Ismaning/Munich, Germany, Tel: +49 (0)89 665506 41 - Fax: +49 (0)89 665506 99 Any views expressed in this message are those of the individual sender, except where the sender specifically states them to be the views of Tertio Ltd. This email has been scanned by the MessageLabs Email Security System.
