Automating Tape Backups With Amanda, Part 2 Example of a UNIX crontab running Amanda

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Amanda is a free soureforge tape backup system with some advanced features. The following crontab, owned by user amanda under which account our Amanda tape backup software runs (atop FreeBSD), defines two period tape backup processes.The amcheck lines tell UNIX to run an amanda check with a particular parameter on each of two back tape sets at 3:00 pm (0 15). If a tape isn't ready, Amanda sends a warning to "root" which we in turn tell FreeBSD is me, so I then get an email kicking me to swap tapes.The amdump lines automate execution of 11:45 pm backups, for SetA every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday and for SetB every Tuesday and Thursday. Because our tape capacity of about 100GB is inadeqate to backup all our servers, we split the jobs in this manner. When there's money, maybe next year, I hope to replace our SDLT drive - which otherwise works fine - with a larger backup drive, maybe LTO.See separate post for a bit on how we configure a particular backup set.--- example ---$ crontab -l0 15 * * 1,3,5 /usr/local/sbin/amcheck -m SetA45 23 * * 1,3,5 /usr/local/sbin/amdump SetAd && mt -f /dev/sa0 offline0 15 * * 2,4 /usr/local/sbin/amcheck -m SetB45 23 * * 2,4 /usr/local/sbin/amdump SetB && mt -f /dev/sa0 offline