Re: Testing an Amanda installation

On Tuesday 13 April 2021 04:22:16 Cristian Zoicas wrote:

> Hello All
>
> I am very new to Amanda and I would like to ask a question about
> the possibility of testing a specific configuration.
>
> Let's assume that I have enuogh confidence in my Amanda configuration
> but before using it in a production environment I would like to test
> how the backups work. Mainly I would like to do the following:
>
>     1) To run the backup procedure a numer of times in a row and
> see/check that the tapes are correctly used and reused.
>
>     2) That I am able to perform restore operations.
>
> Is it possibile to do that? I am mainly interested in 1 because so far
> I was not able to do that. The unexpected thing that happens when I
> run the backup task in a row is that Amanda behaves as if it is not
> able to detect the passing of time (probably because it checks the
> real calendaristic time).
>
> I've also tried to make the backup task thinkg that it is running in a
> different day by using libfaketime. No success.
>
> Thank you.
> Cristian

Many years ago, amanda was a once a day design, but about 15 years back 
it was optionally made aware of time of day. From man amanda.conf, it 
now says:

 usetimestamps bool
           Default: Yes. Deprecated, the value is always Yes. This option 
allows Amanda to track multiple runs per calendar day.

Its # commented out in my config, has been for decades.

There is one option that can make amrestore in the event of restoring to 
a new drive in case the old one failed, as if its set, it checks the 
device and will not restore to a different replaement drive. I disabled 
that check years ago because drives do fail.
See your amanda.conf under 
define application-tool app_amgtar {
 where there are a number of properties defined:
    property "CHECK-DEVICE" "no" #use '--no-check-device' if set to "no"
This one can bite you if set to yes.

Copyright 2019 by Maurice E. Heskett
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