Date: Mon, 26 Jun 1995 16:12:58 -0400 (EDT) From: Branson Matheson <branson@dvals1.larc.nasa.gov> To: greg@deathstar.med.miami.edu (ToxicWaste) Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org (FreeBSD Questions) Subject: Re: need help setting up backup schedule... Message-ID: <199506262012.QAA25861@dvals1.larc.nasa.gov> In-Reply-To: <9506261612.AA00329@leia.med.miami.edu> from "ToxicWaste" at Jun 26, 95 12:12:17 pm
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>
> What I would like to know is how to use the configuration
> file (amanda.conf) to employ the backup schedule that I want.
> Basically, I want a full backup done every week with incremental
> backups on every day in between.
Um... I have a question.. why? Amanda was designed to perform incrimental
as well as full backups of all filesystems in a set over a period. Why
force it to use an un-efficent backup method as daily incrimentals and
weekend fulls? I have over 100 Gigs of filesystems across 80+ systems that
are backed up completely over a two week period in three runs nightly. That
means that at some time in the two weeks, a full backup is done and
progressive incrimentals are done the rest of the time for all partitons
in my disklist.
This is somthing you might consider as an alternative to the aformentioned
method. However I can point you in the right direction if this is the way
you wish to use amanda.
> I have looked at the explanation of the params in the
> man page for amanda but am not sure how to use them to acheive
> what i am aiming for. My guess is that some combination of dumpcycle
> and tapecycle will do this but, instead of playing around with them
> until i get it right, i was hoping that someone could point me in
> the right direction.
sort of. the best way is to have two seperate runs that go off, but
first a more detailed explanation.
here is a more detailed explanation of the parameters that most people
have problems with:
For those running amanda 2.1 or less
mincyle
This is the total number of days in your backup cycle. So if you wish
to have your partitions recieve a full backup within a one week period
and you do not run on the weekends, this number would be 5.
maxcycle
This is the total number of days plus the slide factor if amanda cannot
fit in that disk for whatever reason ( bad tape, machine down, etc... ).
So again in our model, if you are using 5 days as your cycle, this
number could be 6 or greater.. although 7 would be suitable.
For those running 2.2 or greater
dumpcycle
This is the total number of days in the cycle. If you wish your partitions
to recieve a fill backup in a week then it will be one week.
tapecycle
This is the number of tapes in your active tape library. So you are
backing 5 days of every week... and you want to keep 3 months of archives
that would be 60 tapes. ( we have found that 6 months is a good number
for the guy who "thought rm -rf *.o and typed rm -rf * .o" and hadn't
touched a file in a couple of months.) Plus it is also a good idea to
archive a full mincycle's worth of tapes every tapecycle and replace
those tapes. this means that every 3 months and a week, take out those
5 tapes and put in 5 fresh ( and labeled ) ones. this way you change your
tapes out and keep a lid on tape degradation and you have a working
archive.
OK ... hopefully this makes things a bit more apparent. Now onward ...
To have it do daily incrimentals and fulls on the weekends you need
two backup sets.
First make one with all the partitions as is described and make your
amanda.conf so that:
- dumpcycle 1 week
- tapecycle 60 tapes ( this is three months )
or however many you want.
- org "FOO-Inc" ( This means that this is the incrimental dump )
define a few dumptypes with skip-full as a parameter:
- define dumptype comp-medium-inc {
comment " Compress medium priority incrementals"
options compress, skip-full
priority medium
}
- and make all your partitons listed in your diskfile with those
dumptype
dvals1 /scratch comp-medium-inc
ok... that will take care of incrimentals
for fulls:
- dumpcycle 12 days ( This is the number of Saturdays that are in your incrimental tape cycle )
- tapecycle 12 ( This is the number dumps in the incrimental cycle)
define a few more dumptypes with skip-incr as a parameter:
- define dumptype comp-medium-full {
comment " Compress medium priority full-dumps"
options compress, skip-incr
priority medium
}
- and make all your partitons listed in your diskfile with those
dumptype
dvals1 /home comp-high-full
That should do it. set a cron tab entry to use the incrimentals every
weekday and one to run the fulls on the weekends.
> At the very least, if someone could give me a more detailed
> explanation of how these params are used (the man page is pretty
> brief), it would be greatly appreciated.
I hope that this helps.. Again i cannot stress how much easier it is to have
one backup run that runs throughout the week and takes care of deciding when
partitions need incrimentals or fulls. Plus it is a much more efficent use of
tape.
One thing to remember is that you are limited to the storage size of your
device. I have found that out of 100 gigs, i actually backup about 60% of
that and I use gzip compression... I never maxout the tape drive. I regularly
put 8 gigs compressed on an 8500.
- branson
--
MATHESON, E BRANSON E.B.MATHESON@LaRC.NASA.GOV
Mail Stop 931 COMPUTER SCIENCES CORPORATION
NASA Langley Research Center Assigned to Operations Support Division
Hampton, VA 23681-0001 Phone +1 804 864-9700
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