Re: Confused by Amanda

[Mark Fletcher <mark27q1@gmail.com>]

On Sun, Sep 02, 2018 at 11:46:44AM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Sunday 02 September 2018 06:27:01 Dan Ritter wrote:
> 
> > Amanda is not good for the situation you describe.
> 
> No its not ideal in some cases,, which is why I wrote a wrapper script 
> for the make a backup portions of amanda. With the resources and configs 
> that existed at the time that backup was made actually appended to the 
> end of the vtape, pretty much an empty drive recovery is possible. It 
> appends the /usr/local/etc/amana/$config, 
> and /usr/local/var/amanda/record_of_backups to each vtape it makes. So 
> those 2 files can be recovered with tar and gzip, put back on a freshly 
> installed linux of your favorite flavor, and a restore made that will be 
> a duplicate of what your had last night when backup.sh was ran.
> 

Thanks Gene, I was hoping you would pipe up but didn't want to throw the 
spotlight on you if you weren't inclined to. This is exactly what I'm 
after so I will definitely check it out.

Thanks also to Dan and Jose, I can see what you mean and it makes much 
of the Amanda documentation make more sense now. But as I mentioned, my 
configuration currently isn't an end state and I'm planning to expand it 
to cover other machines on my network, at which point Amanda will make 
more sense. I get the concept of two Amandas, one to backup the Amanda 
server of the first, but then you're into a "turtles all the way down" 
scenario, aren't you? Just seems overkill when one Amanda can look after 
its own server as well, albeit with some jiggerypokery which Gene has 
kindly cast light on.

So I think we can agree, Amanda's expected usage model is ideally for 
situations where there are multiple machines to back up, you designate 
one machine the Amanda server (presumably the one with the easiest / 
fastest access to the backup media) and accept that that machine needs 
special, usually separate, arrangements for _its_ backup. But it's 
_possible_ with attention to the right details such as things Gene has 
pointed out, to include the Amanda server machine itself in the backup.

Thanks all, especially Gene for, I suspect, saving me a lot of work.

Mark