Michael, I think you will want 'dumpcycle 1 week' instead of 2 weeks. This means that every 1 week, you will have a level 0 backup of every partition, which is what I think you mean by 'a 2 week latency of backups.' With 8 tapes, you will be creating the current week's backups, and have the previous week's backups to use if something goes wrong this week. For comparison, I'm using an Exabyte changer that holds 10 tapes at a time. I have three magazines for it, so my amanda.conf is set up like this:
dumpcycle 1 week runspercycle 5 tapecycle 30 tapes This way every magazine has two complete backup sets on it (in case of tape failure.) > -----Original Message----- > From: Michael Perry [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] > Sent: Wednesday, December 12, 2001 12:20 PM > To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] > Subject: Re: replacing full tapes? > > > Quoting Bort, Paul on Wed, Dec 12, 2001 at 10:49:31AM -0500: > > You probably don't want to overwrite BUP2. IIRC, "active > tape" means that > > the most recent combination of a specific disk and level > exists on that > > tape. The amoverview command can show what levels were > backed up on which > > days, for starters. > > > > You might also want to look at your tapecycle, dumpcycle, > and runspercycle > > parameters. I usually try to keep dumpcycle at half (or > less) of tapecycle, > > so that I always have a complete set of tapes to restore > from, and the set > > I'm currently overwriting. > > > > > Hi- > > Thanks for the pointer. I had neglected to take into account a few > factors about using the settings like dumpcycle, tapecycle, > runspercycle. My basic need I think is to backup 5 systems 3 > times per > week and have a 2 week latency of backups. This is not a huge network > :) but I really enjoy the way amanda does the scheduling, > planning, etc. > Best I have ever found in some years of Linux work. What I am > considering is how to build the correct settings for this and not > have to buy a lot of very expensive ecrix tapes (almost $100 > per tape). > I have sufficient tapes to handle up to a 14 tape tapecycle > but some of > them are rather old I think and many are new so I am unsure about the > relative health of the tapes. > > If I set the following variables, does this look close to my > goal? BTW, > the goal is to backup systems 3 times per week (Mon, Wed, > Fri) and have > two weeks of backups: > > dumpcycle 2 weeks > tapecycle 8 tapes > runspercycle 3 > > I am assuming with this setup that amanda will backup 3 times per week > according to my crontab and check 3 times per week a bit > earlier for the > right tape. If I want 2 weeks of backups this would equal 6 tapes and > then I would toss in a few extra to take care of any issues like > failures, etc. > > I am backing up 5 systems here at home including a bsd firewall box > which is exceedingly important to my sanity. Perhaps the > other question > is how other smaller LAN users schedule weekly backups or two week > backups when doing dumps not every day but perhaps every other day and > excluding weekends. > > Thanks for the answers to the questions everyone has sent. I should > have provided all the information on my goals and approaches using > amanda first time around. > > -- > Michael Perry | "Do or do not; there is no try" Master Yoda > [EMAIL PROTECTED] | http://www.lnxpowered.org >
