From owner-freebsd-questions Mon Jun 26 13:13:12 1995 Return-Path: questions-owner Received: (from majordom@localhost) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) id NAA02373 for questions-outgoing; Mon, 26 Jun 1995 13:13:12 -0700 Received: from dvals1.larc.nasa.gov (dvals1.larc.nasa.gov [128.155.4.96]) by freefall.cdrom.com (8.6.10/8.6.6) with ESMTP id NAA02367 for ; Mon, 26 Jun 1995 13:13:09 -0700 Received: (from branson@localhost) by dvals1.larc.nasa.gov (8.6.11/8.6.9) id QAA25861; Mon, 26 Jun 1995 16:12:58 -0400 From: Branson Matheson Message-Id: <199506262012.QAA25861@dvals1.larc.nasa.gov> Subject: Re: need help setting up backup schedule... To: greg@deathstar.med.miami.edu (ToxicWaste) Date: Mon, 26 Jun 1995 16:12:58 -0400 (EDT) Cc: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org (FreeBSD Questions) In-Reply-To: <9506261612.AA00329@leia.med.miami.edu> from "ToxicWaste" at Jun 26, 95 12:12:17 pm X-Mailer: ELM [version 2.4 PL21] MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Content-Length: 5421 Sender: questions-owner@freebsd.org Precedence: bulk > > 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