I have a question regarding how best to manage backups to vtapes and archival onto tape media.
First a little history, I used to have a DLT4 9 tape changer and have been running my backups through this for about 3 years now. This changer failed and for a number of reasons was not under support. Fortunately I had a scalar 24 LTO2 changer I can use. However our nightly backups were running around 40-60 Gbytes so unless I could append to tapes this would waste a lot of media. The solution I would like to implement is a series of vtapes each about 30Gbytes and a script to check how much had been used and initiate an archival dump to the LTO2 media if it is in the vicinity of 200Gbytes. So this brings me to my few questions In order to prevent older tapes being overwritten before being stored to tape is it best to basically never reuse a tape and have the script erase and relabel the slots after the archival dump is made? I would need two amanda configurations to manage this kind of configuration. This lead me to worry about recovery - how do I locate the correct archival tape to find the correct tapes for the daily dumps? I have read through the File driver page on the wiki.zamanda.org, but I did not see any specific information about these questions. Am I being dense? TIA Alastair
