Starting out questions, hold rea, increasing number of tapes, etc.

[aram535]

My new backup server has 4 1TB drives attached (non-mirrored) [dedicated to amanda] as /backup/f, g, h and i.

I have /backup/amanda/slots/slotX (15 of them) symlinked to f, g, and h (5 each). /backup/i is the temporary hold area.

Q1) Is the Symlink thing going to cause my any issues?

Q2) Do I need to have a hold area?

Q3) How do you increase the number of slots/tapes from 15 to 20? Do you simply create the directories, label them and that's it?

Q4) Does amanda have duplicate-tape functionality? So that I can backup to SLOT1 and SLOT5 so there is a duplicate tape/copy in case the first drive dies, I have a backup of it on another disk. I know this can be solved with hardware/software mirroring but I am having all sorts of issues with md.

[pyeatman]

Q1) Is the Symlink thing going to cause my any issues?

It shouldn't. This is actually a clever way to make use of different storage sources in one virtual tape changer.

Q2) Do I need to have a hold area?

It is recommended.

[url]http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/FAQ:Should_I_use_a_holdingdisk_when_the_final_dest ination_of_the_backup_is_a_virtual_tape%3F[/url]

Q3) How do you increase the number of slots/tapes from 15 to 20? Do you simply create the directories, label them and that's it?

Pretty much. An additional step I can think of is to edit the "lastslot" parameter in /etc/amanda/<config>/changer.conf to also reflect the change.

Q4) Does amanda have duplicate-tape functionality? So that I can backup to SLOT1 and SLOT5 so there is a duplicate tape/copy in case the first drive dies, I have a backup of it on another disk. I know this can be solved with hardware/software mirroring but I am having all sorts of issues with md.

There is a way to "mirror" tapes as given in the below link but, in your case, this should be much more straightforward. I would use something like rsync to do this after the backup has completed. You could rsync the slots on one disk to a place outside of the Amanda vtape space on another.

[url]http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/How_To:Set_Up_RAIT_(Redundant_Array_of_Independent _Tapes[/url])

[aram535]

Thank you very much, that helped a great deal.

Pretty much. An additional step I can think of is to edit the "lastslot" parameter in /etc/amanda/<config>/changer.conf to also reflect the change.

If I am not using changer.conf, do I need to worry about that?

A little background: Each vtape is 300 GB (4 * 1TB drives - 4 vtapes per drive) and the backup only adds up to about 21GB (full on everything) so I haven't had the need to stripe across tapes.

Since its just a home solution I'm wasting a lot of space. At some point I will optimize it to keep the maximum number of backups maximum number of days.

[pyeatman]

you are welcome. Glad it helped.

Are you not using a changer file with your virtual changer? What is the value of "changerfile" in your amanda.conf?

[aram535]

Here are the changer related configurations from my daily run conf file:

tpchanger "chg-disk"
changerfile "/etc/amanda/intra/changer"
changerdev "/dev/null"

However, now that I look /etc/amanda/intra/changer does not exist in my <config> directory.

[pyeatman]

Assuming you are using "chg-disk" as your changer script ("tpchanger" value), I just discovered that

"The number of slots is equal to your LASTSLOT or tapecycle."

The "LASTSLOT" is referring to the setting

lastslot=#

in your specified changerfile as I was inquiring about above. If this value is not set (as in you don't have a changerfile), then "lastslot" is set to the value for tapecycle in amanda.conf. Thus, if you continue not to have a changerfile, which clearly does not pose a problem, make sure to up your tapecycle value to the new number of slots you want to use.