On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Robert Heller <hel...@deepsoft.com> wrote: > So I would be better off setting runtapes to 1? And then manually > 'flushing' at the beginning of the cycle to deal with the larger fulls? > > Arg... > > This sort of thing is not really well explained in the man pages...
True. The problem is, there's really nobody who knows the details except by looking at the code. The discussions of tapecycle about a year ago are a good example: I think a lot of long-time users were shocked to read amanda-taperscan(7) and learn that their ideas of how taperscan worked were very inaccurate. Anyway, after you've resolved things, I'd love to see additions either to the wiki or to the manpages. Amanda is very difficult to configure if you want to "trick" the planner into doing something specific. Instead, look at the problem and see how you can get Amanda to solve it for you. As I understand it, you have a number of large level-0's, you want to retain your backups for a long time, and your disk space is very limited. First, I would recommend making your tapes a little bit larger, so that each night's level-0's and level-1's can fit comfortably. This may require reducing your retention period slightly, or getting more disk. Second, since you want to use the space on your tapes to their fullest, consider using the flush-threshold parameters to fill tapes to 100% - there's a How To on the wiki. If you do this, you may want to divide your vtapes by three or four so Amanda has a finer-grained tape size to work with (that is, create three times as many vtapes, each one-third their current size, and use runtapes=3). Finally, lengthening your dumpcycle will allow Amanda to do more incrementals. I don't recall the current relationship of tapecycle to dumpcycle, but you can work that out. Dustin -- Open Source Storage Engineer http://www.zmanda.com
