On Thursday 05 January 2017 02:52:05 Jon LaBadie wrote:

> On Thu, Jan 05, 2017 at 12:29:07AM +0100, Stefan G. Weichinger wrote:
> > Am 2017-01-04 um 18:21 schrieb Ochressandro Rettinger:
> > > Are there any instructions available for how to do a full bare
> > > metal restore onto a physical server?  I've got a process down for
> > > restoring VMs, but that's easy, because I can just make a new
> > > virtual hard drive and then move the whole thing onto my virtual
> > > hosts.  I've got a process set up to record information about the
> > > underlying file systems and hard drive layout, but I have no idea
> > > how to take a blank machine and restore onto it.
> > >
> > > Is the general idea that you'd do an OS install, and an Amanda
> > > client install, and then run amrecover from / ?
> >
> > aside from status quo:
> >
> > why not make a wish and a feature request?
> >
> > Shouldn't it be manageable to make amanda dump/store all the up2date
> > meta-info *after* the daily backups (to the defined $storage)?
> >
> > Amanda "knows" everything after dumping and writing the backups to
> > (v)tapes and whatever. Why not enable it(/her ?) to optionally add
> > some kind of footer to all of this which contains stuff like indexes
> > etc?
> >
> > pls let me know if I miss something
> > pls let's discuss that
>
> When this has come up in the past, there was some reservation about
> situations where insufficient (v)tape remained on the last used tape.
> I think an option could be to save it to the holding disk.  It isn't
> needed after amdump is finished (unless dumps are intentionally being
> left on the HD in order to fill a tape), and an optional amount could
> be reserved for the metadata.  Possibly to be flushed on the next
> amdump run.
>
> Jon

I have been appending all that to every vtape after amdump has finished for 
several years.  The one time I needed 
it, it worked well, allowing a recovery to the exact state that existed at the 
end of the nightly run.
This database is several hundred megabytes. Because of the vtapes ability to 
expand to the full capacity of the 
drive its on, it has never created a problem. A vtape is just a directory. My 
wrapper script also saves the 
configuration files, so that last nights run left a directory structure like 
this:
gene@coyote:~$ ls -l /amandatapes/Dailys/data/
total 14894456
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      32768 Jan  5 03:04 00000.Dailys-10
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      36435 Jan  5 03:04 00001.GO704._lib_firmware.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda     104130 Jan  5 03:04 00002.lathe._usr_src.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda   14923068 Jan  5 03:04 00003.shop._home.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      53085 Jan  5 03:04 00004.lathe._etc.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      81309 Jan  5 03:04 00005.shop._var_lib_amanda.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda   14204937 Jan  5 03:04 00006.GO704._home.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda     113014 Jan  5 03:04 00007.lathe._var_lib_amanda.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      53011 Jan  5 03:04 00008.shop._etc.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      36448 Jan  5 03:04 00009.GO704._root.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      36718 Jan  5 03:04 00010.shop._lib_firmware.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      48779 Jan  5 03:04 00011.lathe._home.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      40510 Jan  5 03:04 00012.GO704._usr_local.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      34457 Jan  5 03:04 00013.shop._root.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      36716 Jan  5 03:04 00014.lathe._lib_firmware.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      34647 Jan  5 03:04 00015.GO704._usr_lib_amanda.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      33043 Jan  5 03:04 00016.shop._usr_lib_amanda.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      34496 Jan  5 03:04 00017.lathe._root.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda     199777 Jan  5 03:04 00018.GO704._var_lib_amanda.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      33044 Jan  5 03:04 00019.lathe._usr_lib_amanda.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      32900 Jan  5 03:04 00020.shop._var_amanda.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      57758 Jan  5 03:04 00021.GO704._etc.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      33661 Jan  5 03:04 00022.shop._usr_local.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      32899 Jan  5 03:04 00023.lathe._var_amanda.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      32893 Jan  5 03:04 00024.GO704._var_amanda.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      33642 Jan  5 03:04 00025.lathe._usr_local.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda 8805510758 Jan  5 03:36 00026.coyote._opt.0
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda 4815202825 Jan  5 03:42 
00027.coyote._home_gene_Downloads.0
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda  569274368 Jan  5 03:43 00028.coyote._var.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda  436161308 Jan  5 03:45 
00029.coyote._GenesAmandaHelper-0.61.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda   87965410 Jan  5 03:45 00030.coyote._home_gene.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda   24702624 Jan  5 03:46 
00031.coyote._home_gene_Mail.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda   20808632 Jan  5 03:47 00032.coyote._usr_share.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda   12147691 Jan  5 03:47 00033.coyote._usr_src.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda   13669179 Jan  5 03:48 00034.coyote._usr_local.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda     799338 Jan  5 03:48 00035.coyote._home_amanda.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda    2387968 Jan  5 03:48 
00036.coyote._home_gene_Pictures.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda     196608 Jan  5 03:48 00037.coyote._usr_pix.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      83968 Jan  5 03:49 00038.coyote._usr_bin.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda     307770 Jan  5 03:49 00039.coyote._usr_lib.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda     278528 Jan  5 03:49 00040.coyote._root.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda     159387 Jan  5 03:49 00041.coyote._usr_include.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda     149204 Jan  5 03:50 00042.coyote._home_gene_src.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda     203547 Jan  5 03:50 00043.coyote._lib.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      65166 Jan  5 03:50 00044.coyote._etc.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      63488 Jan  5 03:50 
00045.coyote._home_gene_Documents.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      43008 Jan  5 03:51 00046.coyote._boot.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      46138 Jan  5 03:51 
00047.coyote._home_gene_Download.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      43008 Jan  5 03:51 00048.coyote._sbin.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      73728 Jan  5 03:51 00049.coyote._usr_movies.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      43008 Jan  5 03:51 00050.coyote._bin.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      34866 Jan  5 03:52 00051.coyote._usr_sbin.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      63488 Jan  5 03:52 00052.coyote._CoCo.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      43008 Jan  5 03:52 00053.coyote._usr_dlds_tgzs.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      37332 Jan  5 03:52 00054.coyote._home_ups.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      35134 Jan  5 03:52 00055.coyote._home_nut.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      43008 Jan  5 03:53 00056.coyote._usr_dlds_misc.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      43008 Jan  5 03:53 00057.coyote._usr_music.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      43008 Jan  5 03:53 
00058.coyote._usr_dlds_books.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      43008 Jan  5 03:53 
00059.coyote._home_gene_Videos.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      43008 Jan  5 03:53 
00060.coyote._home_gene_LCNC-isos.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      43008 Jan  5 03:54 
00061.coyote._home_gene_Music.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      32914 Jan  5 03:54 00062.coyote._usr_games.1
-rw------- 1 amanda amanda      32912 Jan  5 03:54 00063.coyote._usr_libexec.1
-rw-r--r-- 1 amanda amanda     102400 Jan  5 03:55 configuration.tar
-rw-r--r-- 1 amanda amanda  415334400 Jan  5 03:55 indices.tar

This script/amanda wrapper, would obviously need to be fine tuned for
ones own backup scheme, but can be had from my web page in the sig.

GenesAmandaHelper-0.61.tar.gz

How well it would work for you, using real tapes, might be ok if the size 
of the tape was reduced by half a gigabyte so amanda would always leave 
room at the end of the tape for those two files. When I was trying to 
use dds-2 tapes that worked reasonably well if the tape descriptor said
the tape was 3.7 gigabytes. But I had so much trouble with the tapes and 
drives that I would have stopped using amanda a decade ago if thats all
I had for media. With hd's of 1 or 2 terabytes at less than a 100 dollar 
bill, and hundreds of times more dependable than tapes and tape drives,
the choice of what to use as backup media is a total no brainer.
When you throw in that the HD is random access, a recovery operation is
easily 50x faster, the choice was confirmed.  The 1TB drive currently 
doing that duty here, has 60,660 spinning hours on it, and has claimed 
it had 25 re-allocated sectors since the first time I ran smartctl
to have it test itself at about 24k spinning hours. If that drive is not
immortal, its makeing one heck of a good try at it. And its nowhere near
full:
gene@coyote:~$ df -h /amandatapes
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sdc2       917G  456G  415G  53% /amandatapes


Cheers, Gene Heskett
-- 
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>

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