Re: backup

[Torbjorn Pettersson <tobbe@strul.nu>]

Bart-Jan Vrielink <bartjan@vrielink.net> writes:

> On Mon, 2002-12-16 at 19:50, Russell Coker wrote:
> > On Mon, 16 Dec 2002 19:36, C. R. Oldham wrote:
> > > We used to use Amanda before we got a tape library and began backing up
> > > all our servers into the library.  We have a heterogenous network
> > > (Linux, Win2000 with Exchange, Oracle).  My experience with Amanda is
> > > that it works pretty well if you
> > > are doing Unix clients only, but doing a heterogenous network requires
> > > lots of scripting.  Plus Amanda doesn't drive tape changers/libraries
> > > out of the box.  It needs some scripting to do that as well.
> > 
> > I'm only interested in backing up Linux and Solaris servers (and Solaris is 
> > optional) so lack of cross platform support is not a problem.
> 
> This is no problem with Amanda. As was said, Amanda does not support
> Windows directly and uses smbclient via a gateway to do Windows backups
> and that's why our only Windows server has its own tapedrive.
> 
> The only scripting I did was a wrapper that dumps the mysql databases
> and creates the LVM snapshots that will be backed up and ejects the tape
> when the backup was succesful (this way the human tape robot knows the
> backup was ok and next day's tape should be inserted).
> 
> > How difficult is the scripting to change tapes?  What exactly needs to be 
> > done?
> 

 Depends on your changer, but for changers that mtx is able to
 talk scsi with no job at all: You choose the supplied script,
 and write a conf file for it telling in which slot the cleaning
 tape is in and so on...

 If you are unable to use any of the supplied ones (which all
really just is small wrappers to enable amanda to use the
various system commands, like mt / mtx and so on, in a generic
way) my guess is you would have problems talking with the tape
drive to start with c/o it being that standard.


> Although I've never used a tapechanger myself, I think the only
> difficulty is that there are many types of tapechanges that are
> supported by Amanda and you'll need to find out which script you need
> for your changer.
> I haven't been on the amanda-users@amanda.org for a few years, but it is
> an excelent mailinglist.
> 
> Amanda is great, but there are a few things it can't do:
> - append to tapes (it is a good thing that Amanda can't do this...)
> - spread a partition over multiple tapes.
> 
> Another 'strange' behaviour of Amanda is that it does not do 'daily' and
> 'weekly' backups, it just spreads out all backups over its backup cycle
> and optimizes the tape usage. This gives better results than doing daily
> incrementals etc. but might be a hard thing to explain to your boss when
> he wants to do a full backup each friday.
> 
> > Does anyone have some sample scripts?
> 
> /usr/share/doc/amanda-common/docs/TAPE.CHANGERS.gz
> If you don't have amanda-common installed, or don't have the amanda
> source local, then you could use google to find a version, like on
> http://www.clug.in-chemnitz.de/vortraege/amanda/docs/TAPE.CHANGERS or
> somewhere else.
> 
> -- 
> Tot ziens,
> Bart-Jan Vrielink
> 
> 
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Regards
Tobbe
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Torbjörn Pettersson               #  Email   tobbe@strul.nu
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