On Wednesday 09 October 2002 20:28, Jay wrote: [and I snipped]
In looking over your amanda.conf, a couple of things are a bit foobar. From your amanda.conf: "dumpcycle 4 weeks" This is a very long time for amanda to go thru the system making sure she has one full backup of everything in your disklist. Most run this at 1 week, or 7 days, although a business user may want that to be a bit shorter just so there is less to play catchup with in the event you are forced to recover from the last full backup. A weeks worth of business transactions to have to repeat is drudgery that sexytaries have been known to quit over. "runspercycle 4 weeks" If amanda takes the weeks arguement as it takes it in terms of dumpcycle, this is a total of 28 runs in one of your very elongated dumpcycles, intimating that it will be run every nite. Nothing wrong with the every night run, most of us do it. Most situations would seem to want something in the line of 7 and 7 for the above pair of variables. You may have to stretch it out to make it fit on the tapes, but given amanda's ability to try to equalize the amount of data taped each night once she gets into the rythm of things, you probably could take the size of the data after compression, divide that by runspercycle, and by adjusting runspercycle and dumpcycle so it uses about 3/4ths of a tape per run. "tapecycle 25 tapes" Here you have insufficient tapes for the elongated dumpcycle chosen as it would take a minimum of 28 tapes to satisfy the runspercycle above. Amanda therefore has no tape she can use for the next backup unless you label at least 3 new tapes and increment the tapecycle to match. 25 tapes is normally enough, but I'd shorten both the dumpcycle and runspercycle until it both fits on the tape, and you have at least 2 full dumpcycles worth of full backups on hand at any one time. I haven't run into this, so I have no idea if amanda will reuse the oldest tape if you do nothing more than reduce the dumpcycle and runspercycle to match the tapecycle. Its worth a try just for effects. :-) Not having any idea of how much data you have to cover, what I would do is to reduce the dumpcycle and runspercycle in unison, first to 14 days each, and let amanda play catchup with that for one dumpcycle or maybe two. Watching the tape usage report amanda mails you, then reduce it one or 2 each cycle until she is using about 3/4ths of a tape every night. With only a 46 gig drive here, part of which is an rsync'd mirror of my gateway machine, I'm only averageing about 50% usage per nightly run on DDS2 tapes. At 4g rated capacity, its about 2gigs that actualy gets written to tape after compression. And its all covered at least once a week. Compression by the drive is pretty much a no-no as it hides the true drive capacity from amanda, besides, software compression can be far more efficient than the drives puny little RLL(2-7) encoder. I have several entries in my disklist that regularly compress to less than 20% of their original size. Do it on the clients even if they are slower than the server because you can parallel the clients, and reduce the network bandwidth to move the compressed data to the server at the same time. -- Cheers, Gene AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M Athlon1600XP@1400mhz 512M 99.17% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
