On Tuesday 26 November 2002 05:13, Nitesh Kumar A. wrote: >Hai: > >I need some advice on this. I get confused with dumpcycles, etc. > >I need one full backup on the 1st day of every month. And then > from sunday to saturday through the entire month, I need to take > incremental backup. How do I take it? I mean incremental backup > from the 1st day of every month to the last day of the month.
That is not how amanda is designed to run. The issue can be forced, but its a lot of re-inventing wheels to do so, and you wind up throwing out a lot of models that just aren't quite round enough to be useable as wheels. Amanda is designed to provide the maximum amount of security for your data, and doing a full on only a monthly basis isn't normally considered good for anything but to keep the human operators organized. IMO one really needs more recent level 0's. In the amanda.conf file, there are 3 variables, dumpcycle, runspercycle, and tapecycle. dumpcycle is that amount of time that amanda has to fit a full backup of every disklist entry (DLE), and is often set to 7 days or 1 week, they are interchangeable terms. This means that amanda is being told that in those 7 days, the whole system must be backed up at level 0 at least once. Next is runspercycle, which may or may not equal the dumpcycle, but usually does for those with changer equipt drives so that they can run un-attended over the weekends. If you just do it on business days, then set it to 5 so that amanda is told she has only 5 runs to do this 100% of every DLE in 7 days. Last is tapecycle, which tells amanda how many tapes she can use before she will allow a tape to be re-used. For obvious reasons, one should have on hand and in this 'cycle' enough tapes to hold the last 2 full dumpcycle tapes. When first starting up amanda, only uncomment enough entries in the disklist that will fit on a tape, uncommenting additional entries for subsequent runs. Once amanda is up and running on a schedule, she will adjust the levels of the dumps being done each night in an attempt to hit an average of every run each night. This prevents it from dong a 23 gig backup one night, and a 1.2 gig backup the next night. Left to her own devices, amanda will do an amazing job of guarding your data. Let her do it her way. Its a lot less hassle for you. All you have to do is respond to the emails she will send you when she is out of tape in the changer magazine. Also, each run of amanda WILL take a different tape, amanda isn't designed to do an append on a tape. Thats much too dangerous to even contemplate with some drives. This tends to make the home user such as I am, use DDS2 dat tapes because they're cheap. I have about 40, with 28 in the current tapecycle, doing a dumpcycle of 7 days, with a runspercycle also at 7. Doing it your way will require a months worth of tapes just to do a full restore. Doing it the recommended way above reduces this to only a weeks worth of tapes to read back to do the restore, and if something has happened to one of those tapes, then you can backup an additional week and restart, with the next youngest set of tapes. Let amanda do it her way and you'll find she works very well indeed. -- Cheers, Gene AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M Athlon1600XP@1400mhz 512M 99.19% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
