On Tuesday 09 July 2002 09:21, Mark Cooke wrote: >Hi, > >I have browsed the online mailings and just really want to confirm > some settings for the dumpcycle and runspercycle. > >At present I'm just setting up a full backup system, then work to > daily incrementals. > >I have got the system to work by running a onetime backup using my >configuration, so that areas fine, but I'm still slightly confused > (even after reading the explanations) at what the: dumpcycle and > runspercycle are. > >Heres my senario: > >I want to run a a 2 week cycle for full backups every sunday > night. > >so I have set the following: >dumpcycle: 14 days > ( I have set this to 14 days as 2 weeks span 14 days in total) >runspercycle: 2 > ( I want to do 1 full run a week, so as the dumpcycle is over 2 > weeks, then I want to do 2 full level '0' dumps) >tapecycle: 5 > ( Iam using 5 tapes, as I will only need 2 tapes in total, but > added some more for disaster recovery) > > >Have I worked this out correctly?
It looks ok on the face of it. However, doing one full a week is overloading the egg basket and issueing an open invite for a stumble. Unless tapes for your deck are prohibitively expensive (whats your data worth?) and a tape is sufficient to hold the full system, you really should add more tapes and do a run nightly. If you add entries to the disklist each day that describe something less than a full tapes worth, until the system is fully described, then amanda will automaticly spread the fulls out over many tapes thereby enhancing your chances of a full recovery by many times. Once up and running, amandas scheduler will advance the levels, doing fulls before the 'schedule' in most cases just to fill up the tape. Here, I do a 1 week dumpcycle with 1 tape per run on a system with about 90 gigs of drives about half full, using DDS2 4gig tapes and software compression where it works, all on a (tapecycle = 20) 20 tape library rotation in a changer that holds 3 tapes, changing them for the next triplet in rotation every 3 days. And amanda is often moving a full on this or that disklist entry up by 2 or 3 days just to fill up a tape. None of my disklist entries describe more than a tapes worth of data (or shouldn't anyway). And obviously I'm using tar, not dump because dump does filesystems only, and doesn't do excludes. Tar works by directory structure, and does do excludes, Some of my filesystems are in the 30 gig area such as /usr, and would not be 'dump'able to a 4 gig tape. -- Cheers, Gene AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M Athlon1600XP@1400mhz 512M 99.05% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
