On Wednesday 19 February 2003 09:08 am, Alex Page wrote: >I'm setting up an amanda system, and I'm a little confused by the >jargon. What I'm trying to do is one full backup a week (on > Fridays) and partial backups every other weeknight. I want to > operate four weeks of tapes in rotation, so at any time we have > four weeks of backup down to the granularity of one day. > >Am I right in thinking that this is a dump cycle of 7 days, with 5 >runs per cycle and 4 tapes per run? Sorry if this is alarmingly > obvious, I'm pretty new to all this :)
Chuckle, we can tell. First, amanda doesn't willingly do a fixed schedule such as you have in mind, not without a lot of whip cracking and cussing. What amanda will do, and do very well indeed is back up your data, doing it in a schedule she will determine, but based on the limitations you give her. Those limitations are: 1. dumpcycle. The number of days she has to do a full backup of everything in the disklist. 2. runspercycle. The number of runs in dumpcycle days. 3. tapecycle. The number of tapes in the rotation pool she has to get all this done with. Also entering into it is the size of the tapes you are using, prefereably stated in terms of its un-compressed capacity because software compression allows amanda to track tape useage much more accurately. If you can, turn the hardware compression off before you ever write to a single tape, its much simpler than trying to fix it later. So basicly, you need to see how much data you have, how many tapes it will take to hold it all + incrementals in one runspercycle, then multiply that by at least 2 to get tapecycle, the number of tapes you will need. Start amanda out by running amcheck with a fully configured disklist, but for the first run, comment stuff out until it won't overflow the tape, next run uncomment about that much more, etc until its all exposed and being backed up in dumpcycle days. Amanda will attempt to adjust things a bit one day or the other in order to balance the tape useage until it uses about the same amount each night, but that may take tapecycle days or more to fully jiggle into place. Oh, and welcome to the amanda admirers group. :-) -- Cheers, Gene AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M Athlon1600XP@1400mhz 512M 99.23% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
