>Thank you so much for your
>help -
No problem.
>Saga - You told me a long time ago
>make sure that my tapecycle in the amanda.conf file matched the
>number of tapes I was actually using - well I hesitated to make this
>change for a few reasons:
>
>1st reason - my immediate supervisor - scolded me several times
>on how I couldn't get amanda to do full dumps on weekends and
>incrementals during the week - onto the same tape.
That's more or less correct with the current version of Amanda. At some
point we may relax this (I actually thought about how to do it a couple
of days ago), but that's vapor-ware as far as you're concerned.
I can think of one alternative (two configs, the one that really writes
to tape would dump the holding disk as a regular disk) but it would make
your configuration much more confusing to deal with and recovery would
be more error prone, both of which make it a bad idea in general.
>And finally because he is the same
>supervisor who went ahead and set the tapecycle parameter to 8 in the
>amanda.conf file. Who was I to question his changes?
Now wait a minute. After all the E-time we've spent together over the
last few weeks, who are you going believe? Me, or him? :-) :-) :-)
>Comments on the below email? I was told that the tapecycle parameter was
>to be set to 8.
Short answer -- do **not** lie to Amanda about the tapecycle. Set it
to the number of tapes you have.
> You're not doing incrementals. You have configured amanda to do a full
>dump every time.
Not quite true. You have **asked** Amanda to do a full dump every
time, but without the tape it is going to fall back and do incrementals
(within the limits of holding disk space, etc).
> After having read the amanda(8) manpage for a few minutes, it looks to
>me like the right thing to do is:
>...
> dumpcycle 1 week
> runspercycle 7
> tapecycle 8 tapes # This will give us two months.
>
> This tells amanda by default we want to run do full backups once a week
>with incrementals (level 1) every day in between, and that there are 8
>tapes in the rotation. This would give us two months worth of data in
>regular backups which seems reasonable. Anything we want to archive
>forever we can do separately or by hand.
As above on the tapecycle value. And there's no way you'd get two months
of data on four tapes doing one per week. Someone is confused here.
It sounds like he thought you really had eight tapes, which would explain
why he wanted to set tapecycle to eight.
The dumpcycle value in your situation doesn't make much difference.
I would set it to zero to tell Amanda that whenever it gets a chance
(has a tape) it should first try to do a full dump.
On the other hand, since you've now changed "reserve" to allow full
dumps in the holding disk, this might be a bad idea. So setting it to
one week is OK, too, but I would definitely use "amadmin <config> force"
then before the real amdump to make sure it does all full dumps..
> Here's what I want:
Yeah, yeah. It's always what **they** want. :-) :-)
> Mon-Sat: Incremental dump to holding disk sundev1:/dump (level 1). Do
>_not_ include holding disk in incrementals, as you'd be backing up data
>twice.
OK, I think we've got you set up for that now.
>Sun Eve/Mon AM: Full backup of everything but holding disk to tape.
>Flush incrementals to tape as well.
Amanda will not both flush the holding disk and do a normal run of the
full dumps to a single tape. Sorry.
> Amanda should be able to do this almost in its default mode. You need
>to configure a disklist that includes everything except the holding disk
>(which is now a separate partition) ...
Right, which I think you've already done.
>and create a dumptype that tells
>amanda to only flush to tape at the end of the dump cycle.
Dumptypes have nothing to do with flushing. That's a strictly by hand
operation.
> There's no reason to have to do anything here other than change the tape
>once a week. None of this should have to be done manually or require any
>babysitting.
You will have to change the tape twice. Once to insert a tape in the
previously empty drive and then run amflush (by hand). Then I would do
an "amadmin <config> force" just to encourage Amanda even harder to do
a full dump of everything on the next run. Finally, you would insert
the next tape and let an amdump happen (which could be done via cron
late at night).
I'm sorry. I know this isn't what you or your supervisor want, but it's
all we've got at the moment.
On the other hand, it's not very difficult, either. On the (morning of
the) day before the night you want to do the full backup, ask amadmin
what tape it wants next, insert that and start amflush. After you
answer a question it asks, it will run unattended through the day.
Before you go home that night (after amflush completes), tell amadmin
to force everything, ask it again what tape is next, insert that and
go home. The nightly cron run of amdump will use that tape to do a
full dump and the next night things will go back to the (now empty)
holding disk only mode.
Note that with only four tapes, this will give you two weeks of backups.
To get ~two months you would need 16 tapes.
> Perhaps you should just ask outright on the amanda list how to do this.
You have, and we have spoken :-).
>Denise E. Ives
John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
