On Wed, Oct 09, 2002 at 04:53:55PM +0200, Toralf Lund wrote: > Well, no matter what I do, I need *some* way to label new tapes without > too many '-f's etc. Also, I know some people are using separate configs > for permanent backups, but it seems like this requires a lot of additional > work,
Not nearly as much extra work as trying to coerce amanda into running in a fashion she's not designed to, such as tying specific tapes to specific days of the week or mixing standard and archival backups within a single config. > and also introduces the risk of not having the same directories > backed up on "normal" and "archival" runs (which is essential.) Easy fix: Make Archive/disklist a link to Daily/disklist. Two configs both reading the same list of directories to back up. Risk averted. > Well, maybe I should just use 10 or something (4 runspercycle + 1 extra > tape * 2), but what tapes will be used, then? All of them. Tape labels are meaningless to amanda. > How does Amanda decide what tape to use next, and what tapes are > considered active, when there are more than "tapecycle" different labels? amanda will request the least-recently used tape. If there are more than <tapecycle> tapes labeled, she'll accept a freshly-labeled tape or any tape that's not in the <tapecycle - 1> most-recently used. So now you're probably thinking, "Well, in that case, I'll do MonN through ThuN for the first three weeks, then Mon-Oct02 through Thu-Oct02 for the fourth week." Yes, it'll probably work, for some value of "work". But it will cause all kinds of additional problems. The two which spring to mind offhand: - As was mentioned earlier, your tapes won't stay synchronized to the calendar. If Monday is a holiday and the tape doesn't get switched, amanda will ask for the Monday tape on Tuesday. - Until a level 0 runs for a partition in week 1, it will have incrementals based off the previous week 4's data. Same for week 4 having increments from week 3. You really don't want to do that. At best, having incrementals in one tape class (daily or archival) that reference backups in the other class is useless. At worst, it can make it a real PITA to try and figure out where to find your data when you need to restore from the backups. So just use two configs. Label your daily tapes Daily1-DailyN, set your tapecycle to N, and let amanda figure out which tape she wants when. Label your archival tapes Archive<Month><Year>, set the tapecycle to 1 (or anything else, since you'll always be feeding it a new tape), and turn on always-full. Have them both use the same disklist file to avoid maintenance hassles. Plus, since the archives are always-full, you won't need to store as many tapes.
