On the care and feeding of Amanda Backups

Amanda will ask for tapes every 5 or 7 working days, depending how many tapes have been loaded. There are 40 in the cycle.

The most recently used 10 to 26 are in the machine room
The next 14 are in a box in Nigel's office
The remaining 0 to 16 are in the machine room ready to be loaded

The tape robot door is not normally locked, but is quite stiff - pull hard. The tape robot holds up to 7 tapes. You need to load slots 6 and 7 before slots 1 and 2. All operations with the tape drive commence with the mode button, possibly pressed several times. The next and previous buttons change a parameter such as a slot number once the required mode has been reached. The select button starts the operation.

I normally only move tapes offsite about every fortnight. If you keep 10 recent tapes in the machine room, you will not be likely to need a tape from Nigel to answer a restore request. 10 tapes should contain 1 copy of everything 14 is overkill.

The verification pass has been fairly reliable since I swaped tape drives with grindon. If it fails, my policy has been to force a level 0 dump on any backups which may have failed. The amverify output is in tape-sequence order, and the following command will produce the same list for the tape specified (the tape label is given in the amdump and amverify messages):-

amadmin ncl find | grep byerhope03 | sort +5n -6

Additional level 0 dumps can be forced with (for example):-

amadmin ncl force byerhope /dev/sdj3

C.R.Ritson@newcastle.ac.uk

30 May 2002