Hello all,

We had somebody come up and set up a RHEL5 web server for us and they disappeared. They told us they set up a backup for our MySQL db but we aren't able to find anything to resembles a backup of any kind. I have noticed that mysql-zrm is on there but it looks like the last backup was on 9/08 and the username it uses isn't even on the box anymore. I have also noticed amanda installed on the computer but I am unable to determine if it is active or not. Can anybody tell me how to find out if it's active and where it might be backing up to? We don't have a tape drive on the box so it should be somewhere on the HDD.

Thanks in advance for your help!

Check for an amanda user or an amandabackup user. If it's home directory is, say, /usr/local/etc/amanda, then look to see if there is an amanda.conf in /usr/local/etc/amanda/daily or something like that. Do an `su - amanda[backup]` and then `amcheck daily`. You'll either need to know the password or do the `su` from root. That will tell you the status of the last run. Also, as user amanda[backup], do `crontab -l` and see if it exists if there is an entry for amcheck and/or amdump.

Those checks will give you an idea of whether Amanda has been configured and/or run. Then you may want to hurry on over to http://wiki.zmanda.com and brush up on it.

I'm less familiar with ZRM for MySQL, but your approach should be similar. If it is running, there should be a crontab entry somewhere (see if there is a user for it), and it should be doing mysqldumps to disk. Those would then get picked up by Amanda; and, if you have a tape drive or tape library, might be putting things there. The amanda.conf would tell that.

Thanks for the help choogendyk.

I don't know the password for the amandabackup user so I went in as root and this is what I get:

[root@rh5-cms /]# amcheck daily
-bash: amcheck: command not found


I typed in the following too:

find / -name "amcheck*"

The only result I got back was for a "amcheckdump.8.gz" file.

I ran the crontab -l too and got the following result:

[root@rh5-cms /]# crontab -l -u amandabackup
no crontab for amandabackup


Judging by all of these findings, is it safe to assume that amanda isn't doing any kind of backup?

If you can get on as root, then you can do

# su - amandabackup

$ ls -la

$ amcheck daily

If that doesn't show you anything and you can't find an amanda.conf within a directory (should be daily) in the amandabackup user's home directory, then the person who disappeared apparently didn't set it up.

If you need to get into it yourself, then try the quickstart guide on the Zmanda wiki -- http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Quick_start. That's what I originally did. You may have to jump out from that to read other stuff as you get into it, but keep coming back to the quick start guide.

I don't think he ever set anything up. I ended up following this process to set up a backup and it seems to be working:

http://www.zmanda.com/quick-mysql-backup.html

I was able to do a verify on the backup and it said it was good. Just figuring out a way to test the data in the backup. Shouldn't be too hard though.

Thanks again for the help.