As you may have guessed now, I'm in the process of setting up Amanda for our network (we've been using plain archive backups for far too long.) I think I have got most of the configuration right, but of course I don't understand all the details concerning dump cycles etc.
I want my data to be backed up once a week, and the dump process to run on weekdays only, so I've specified dumpcycle 1 week and runspercycle 5 Also, I'm not interested in incremental backups right now, so I'm using "skip-incr" in the dumptype definitions. This seems to have the effect that Amanda waits for exactly one week before it tries to back up something that was backed already, or to put it differently, that if something was dumped on, say, Tuesday of one week, it will re-schedule it for the next Tuesday. That's fine in many causes, but what happens if the size of some of the filesystems that were dumped on Monday of the first week has been reduced? I would then want some of the data that was originally scheduled for Tuesday (or even the other days) to be considered as well, for maximum utilisation of the tapes etc. Similarly, if something bad happened when backing up one of Monday's file systems so that it had to be delayed to Tuesday, I still want it to be included on the following Monday. I'm not absolutely sure, but it does not look like this will happen in my configuration; it seems like directories that was backed up less than 1 week ago will always be skipped regardless of the available dump space etc. So is there any way I can tell Amanda to automatically start dumps ahead of schedule if output space permits it. Or is there anything else I can do to get the desired effect? I guess I could try with a shorter dump cycle, but that might mean that the same data would be backed up twice during the same week, which I don't want. -- - Toralf
