We're in the process of replacing our BRU (inflexible) and Arkeia (buggy) 
with Amanda.  Everything's gone well with installation et al, but I'm 
confused about dumpcycles, etc.

Specifically, I have;

- 3 tapes per day (about 150Gb to be backed up).  Each day's backup is a 
'full' backup i.e. no differential or incremental

- 5 days per week (Monday - Friday)

- 5 weeks worth of tapes (75 in all) to be cycled.

My initial thoughts were simply

dumpcycle 35 # 5 'real' weeks
runspercycle 25
tapecycle 75 # nospares!

But this will involve incremental/differential which I don't want.  So, I 
tried;

dumpcycle 0
tapecycle 75

This worked, but Amanda is now happy to overwrite any tape in the set other 
than the most recently used (i.e. yesterday's).  I want error messages if 
any of the tapes are used before their 5 week validity is up.  So, I'm now 
thinking;

dumpcycle 35
runspercycle 25
tapecycle 75

and adding

strategy noinc

to my disklist.  Will this force Amanda to do full backups each run, and 
also preserve the tapes for the full dumpcycle?

I'm also unsure about how to slot an archive into the mix.  I take 
quarterly archives, but how does one do this with Amanda?  Setting up a 
separate archive backup set is obvious, but is there an elegant way to slot 
this into the run?  The only way I can see is to massage the crontab, to 
take the 'Daily' run out in favour of the 'Quarterly' archive when the time 
comes.  Pretty clunky, but if that's the way to do it, it's a small price 
to pay.

Thanks in advance

Bryan Tonnet
[EMAIL PROTECTED]


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