[Nottingham] Amanda Tape Backup

[Gavin Henry]

<quote who="Richard Bagshaw">
> Morning Guys,
>
> Bit of a novice when it comes to Amanda tape backup systems, but I have
> chosen this path and so far im happy with it -- the system I have at the
> moment is a Centos server with an internal scsi LTO-2 tape drive with 10
> tapes @ 200/400gb each.  I have everything working correctly and each
> night
> it will run the crontab and perform its backup.  My slight confusion comes
> with the whole dumpcycle, tapecycle, runspercycle and runstape thing ...
>
> Firstly, as I understand it the definitions for these terms are as follows
> :-
>
> dumpcycle (currently 2 weeks) = the length of time that it takes to
> complete
> a full set of backups, after this amount of time we start putting in tape
> 1
> again etc to be overwritten

Yes.

> tapecycle (currently 10)  = the number of tapes available

So you are running amdump 5 times a week?

> runspercycle (currently 9) = how many backups to perform (full and/or
> differential) during the dumpcycle, so if the dumpcycle was 2 weeks and
> the
> runspercycle was 9 then it would do 9 backups in the two week period?

Yes. So the first week you run amdump mon-fri, second, mon-thu.

I would have 12 and tapecycle 12, in case anything goes wrong over 10 runs.

> runtapes (currently 1) = how many tapes each backup task should use, in my
> case - no autoloader, so this is 1

Correct.

> What I would ideally like is to have two sets, both using 5 tapes, so ...
>
> Week 1 : TapeSet01
> Week 2 : TapeSet02
> Week 3 : TapeSet01
> Week 4 : TapeSet02
>
> The reason I want todo this is because I want to be able to take offsite
> backups, and since amanda manages the whole schedule of when it does a
> full
> backup it kinda makes it impossible to know when to take a single tape
> offsite, so im thinking at the end of each week just take away one set, or
> is there another better way to deal with offsite backups ?

See the amanda wiki, for "archive" and "offsite"

http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Quick_start



>
> Anyone had any experience with amanda and this kind of setup im trying to
> acheive?  I know 10 tapes is an odd low number, but thats budgets I guess
> ... :/
>
> Thanks again...
>
> --
>
> Regards,
>
> Richard Bagshaw
> richard at bagshaw.co.uk
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