This article is for Amanda Enterprise (AE)
Caution: failure to read these instructions completely and carefully may result in data loss.
The following steps may be used any time it is desired to use system tools to extract a backup image such as when a backup set’s configuration and index files are no longer available. It is of note that this should only be considered as a last resort. In most cases, other Amanda applications (e.g. amrecover, amrestore, amfetchdump, etc.) should be favored above using system tools.
Legacy (vtape):
Change directories to a temporary directory that is large enough for the restored data and use the restore command mentioned at the end of the backup header to restore the backup. Specify the backup file within the dd command as an absolute path. Restoring to a temporary directory is recommended as restored files will overwrite files of the same name in the current working directory and, in some cases, will remove any files and directories not found in the backup.
Simplified Disk (sdisk):
The newer sdisk option is fairly similar to Legacy vtape. However, sdisk does have some major changes. There are no longer any “virtual slots.� Instead, the sdisk backup images are kept together in a single directory. The new format also includes both a dump header and an Amanda label, each are 32k in size.
As is true with Legacy vtape, when actually restoring you will want to change directories to a temporary location with enough space to accommodate the restore. If you restore to the original location, you will overwrite data and any files or directories not in the backup image will be removed.
Windows Disk Images
If the backup is Windows data, the command stated in the header restores a zip file. The header can be accessed using the same commands above depending on whether the backup uses vtape or sdisk. This zip file can either be copied to a Windows machine where PKZip or equivalent zip utility can be used to extract the data. The unzip UNIX command can also be used to extract data on the Amanda server. As an example:
# for vtape dd if=00001.WindowsClient.C__Users_Public.0 bs=32k count=1 # for sdisk dd if=public-AA-WindowsClient-0000000001 bs=32k count=2