Hello A while back I installed Amanda for backups. I have a pretty simple setup at the moment which I may expand later. At the moment only one machine, running Jessie, is backed up by Amanda.
My main PC is both the Amanda server and the machine Amanda is backing up. Recently I started to think about what would happen if I suffered a catastrophic failure on this machine. Like if one of its SSDs died a sudden death. I have read up on amrecover but both the documentation and what I have read in forums online seem to assume that in a recovery situation the Amanda server will be intact. How then is one supposed to protect the Amanda server? And in my case, what is the best way to make sure my Amanda backups are actually usable for restore in a recovery situation? The backup "tapes" are virtual tapes on large-capacity disks in an external USB3 drive cage. The recovery scenario is my PC takes a nosedive but the contents of the external drive cage are fine. For example, failure of one internal SSD in the PC containing most of the operating system, /home etc. Perhaps a bit more background in case needed to be clear: I am not bothering to back up the system software that I can replace by reinstalling Jessie. I am only backing up /etc, /opt (where I have a SVN repository, a mysql database, a big bunch of videos, and the hard disks of 2 Windows VMs) and a few other places, including of course /home. My backup script shuts down my SVN server and my mysql database, and either includes or excludes the disks for my VMs depending on whether they are running, then kicks off Amanda. So /etc/amanda/disklist gets built every time from a template and based on the circumstances the script finds on each run. I note looking in /etc/amanda/ that disklist and tapelist are both updated every time, disklist by my script and tapelist presumably by Amanda. I'd assume that if I suffered a disk failure, replaced the disk, re-installed Jessie and tried to use Amanda to restore my backups of my stuff, I'd be hosed right now because my current /etc/amanda and its subdirectories would be gone. Is this correct? Amanda would not be able to recover in this situation, right? If so, I need to back those up some other way. And I need to do so every day, because Amanda will update the tapelist file every day, and I'd assume if I don't have the latest tapelist file it's not going to be able to restore my backups??? Is that correct? What is the _right_ way to do this? And, if I were using Amanda as its creators obviously intended and backing up multiple machines, what would the recommended way to back up the Amanda server itself (ie its configuration and current state) be? I plan in a few days to boot this machine from a live Jessie ISO, and run a "restore" to a spare large disk I have lying around, to check I understand how to restore after a disaster. Preparing myself mentally for that has led me to the realisation I am nowhere near ready in my understanding... I know there are some long-standing users of Amanda on here so I'm hoping someone can help me figure out what I am missing... Thanks in advance Mark
