On Friday 29 December 2017 17:12:07 Jon LaBadie wrote: > On Fri, Dec 29, 2017 at 12:28:33PM -0800, Chris Miller wrote: > > Hi Folks, > > > > Just setting things up, and I think I ran out of docs... > > > > I have no tape drives, so that means "vtape", which is fine, as long > > as I can size the vtape volume to be no larger than and no smaller > > than the current backup under consideration. Is this possible? Seems > > like a silly question, but physical tapes have a specific size and a > > small backup will result in surplus tape and a large backup will > > result in multiple volumes. I'd like to avoid both situations. > > > > I found very little documentation. In fact there was so little, that > > I think I saw all of it this morning. I have found: > > http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/User_documentation Is there a > > hidden archive that I haven't found? > > Welcome to amanda Chris. Two comments first. > > The size of a vtape is its "maximum" size. A 100GB vtape does not > take up 100GB of disk unless it contains a backup of that size. > > Working with multiple vtapes and virtual changers is a breeze in > amanda. Don't try to avoid multiple tape backups. > > Suppose you were used to working with 100GB physical tapes. You may > feel inclined to create 100GB vtapes in amanda. You may do that and > if your disk is 1TB, you would probably create 10 vtapes. Explore > 2 possibilities. > > Using 100GB vtapes, telling amanda to use only 1 vtape per run, you > may discover most (all?) your vtapes are not full. After you gain > some data from backups you may find your tapes average well under > 100% full and you can allocate more vtapes than 10 x 100GB to your > 1TB drive. > > As a real example, I have 20TB of storage for vtapes and 240 x 100GB > vtapes. The 6 disks average 75-80% full even though I have 20% more > vtapes than I "should". > > Another possibility is to allocate vtapes of 10 (or 20GB) and tell > amanda that it can use up to 10 (or 5) vtapes per run. Also tell > amanda that DLEs* may be split across multiple tapes using "chunks" > of about 10% or 20% the size of the vtape. > > This would be an efficient use of your storage. A backup totalling > 30GB would take 3 vtapes, 90GB would take 9. Each vtape except the > last would be filled to within 1 "chunk"-size. > > Good Luck, > HTH, > Jon > While we are on this subject, why, with a 10 day cycle, working over 30 vtapes of nominally 3.2 GB per vtape, does amanda's planner absolutely refuse to use a level 2 or beyond? It often promotes a level 2 to a level 0 when it has 6+ days left in its 10 day cycle.
The end result is a 1 TB drive with those 30 vtapes on it, stays at about 87-90% capacity. Currently doing this machine, 2 in the shop and 4 in the garage every night. I'd love to setup a 4 day cycle, but amanda refuses to co-operate. Another is that the planner can setup a level 2, say so in the email I get when its done, but 40 lines down in a 57 active line lde, when it has actually done it, something is getting confused and a level 0 is actually done to that DLE the planner said it was going to do a level 2 of. Not a good way to run a train. But this year is into the 19th year I've been using amanda. Here is a furinstance planner: Incremental of coyote:/GenesAmandaHelper-0.61 bumped to level 4. coyote /GenesAmandaHelper-0.61 0 7084 3333 47.1 12:58 4387.5 0:35 97515.3 My logs are loaded with similar furinstances... > * DLE == Disk List Entry, the unit of backup for amanda. A DLE > may be a file system (say / the root fs) or other more complex > entries (like root but not /var or /opt or /usr/local which are > backed up in other DLEs 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>
