Amanda

Backups with Amanda

Amanda is a network backup solution based on a client / server architecture. It has been almost fully puppetized (see details below). For amanda to work, the server (currently tridge.wikimedia.org) needs to be running, and each server will need the amanda-client package installed. The backups are initialized by the server itself, using both Cron and some intelligence provided by Amanda (which will decide what to backup in which order, based on network usage, size of backups and so on. The clients and path to backup are defined on the server, but the configuration file is managed by puppet.

Backup Strategy

I have setup a pretty basic backup strategy, based on industry standards. There are three classes of backups:

• Daily backups: Those are rotating 6 tapes with incremental backups every day of the week.
• Weekly backups: 4 tapes in rotation with incremental compressed backup.
• Monthly backups: 12 tapes in rotation to cover the year. Each month will be a full backup, which will also be compressed.

These strategy can be modified somewhat easily from Puppet, but the virtual tapes will have to be regenerated (details below).

Setting up a new backup client

   Conveniently, this will all be taking place on the puppet server!

• edit site.pp, find the host you want to backup, add 'include backup::client;' (See Mchenry host definition for an example).
• edit puppet/files/backup/disklist to specify what the client is, and what the path is/are (I am hoping to puppetize this soon)
• run puppetd -tv on the client to make sure everything is in order. Note: you might have to run that command 2 or 3 times, depending... So is puppet. It doesn't necessarily do things in order...