>...  Everything's gone well with installation et al, but I'm 
>confused about dumpcycles, etc.

That's a common issue.

>- 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.

OK.

>My initial thoughts were simply
>
>dumpcycle 35 # 5 'real' weeks

FYI, this can be entered as:

  dumpcycle 5 weeks

to make it more self-documenting.

>But this will involve incremental/differential which I don't want.  So, I 
>tried;
>
>dumpcycle 0
>...

Instead of setting dumpcycle to 0 in this section of amanda.conf, you
might try setting it in the "global" dumptype that all the other dumptypes
inherit.  That should inhibit the incrementals just like it did outside
the dumptype, but might get around the "any tape is valid" problem.

>I'm also unsure about how to slot an archive into the mix.  ...

Depends a bit on what you want to do.  As you said, some crontab magic
might work (easier would be to write a script that crontab runs that in
turn calls amdump and have the script make all the decisions).

If you just want to take one set of tapes offsite (for instance),
you might be able to physically swap them out and replace them with
new ones (or ones that came back from the vault).  One trick would be
to dd the first file (32 KByte blocks) of each tape going out onto the
corresponding tape coming in to make them fit back into the normal cycle.
That's easier than rerunning amlabel on them which can re-order the tape
cycle and generally confuse things.

>Bryan Tonnet

John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]

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