Hi,
On Mon, 25 Jun 2001, John R. Jackson wrote:
> >... I need 11 tapes for 1 week's backup? Seems like too many. ...
>
> The idea is to have enough tapes for two complete dump cycles, so 11
> tapes is the recommended number for two weeks.
>
> The reasoning is that you would have (at least) two full dumps of
> everything. So if one tape with a full dump of something you want
> turns out to be unreadable, you've got another you could use (older,
> but better than nothing).
>
This reasoning is very reasonable. And I think now I
understand the recommended way to run Amanda. Can I ask about
running Amanda in a non-recommended, non-intended, risky way? Because
there's some interest,
in my group, in using only 6 tapes. And, as the tapes have a 60gb capacity
and we don't have that much data, maybe 20GB for a full and 5GB for an
incremental, there's further interest in
storing several days worth of
backups on the holding disk and then flushing them all onto a tape. This
possibility
is mentioned on Amanda's faq-o-matic under 'What if my tape unit uses
expensive tapes, and I don't want to use one tape per day? Can't Amanda
append to tapes?' Just wondering if anyone has experience running
amdump with tapes only once a week to perform full backups, and running
it without tape on the other days, so that it performs incremental backups
and stores them in the holding disk which is flushed to tape once
or twice a week. Does this non-recommended Amanda kluge work? Is recovery
horrible?
Thanks,
Pam
