At Sat, 2 Oct 2010 16:06:17 -0500 "Dustin J. Mitchell" <[email protected]> wrote:
> > On Sat, Oct 2, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Robert Heller <[email protected]> wrote: > > So I would be better off setting runtapes to 1? Â And then manually > > 'flushing' at the beginning of the cycle to deal with the larger fulls? > > > > Arg... > > > > This sort of thing is not really well explained in the man pages... > > True. The problem is, there's really nobody who knows the details > except by looking at the code. The discussions of tapecycle about a > year ago are a good example: I think a lot of long-time users were > shocked to read amanda-taperscan(7) and learn that their ideas of how > taperscan worked were very inaccurate. Anyway, after you've resolved > things, I'd love to see additions either to the wiki or to the > manpages. OK, It looks like things are going to be 'interesting' for the next few months. > > Amanda is very difficult to configure if you want to "trick" the > planner into doing something specific. Instead, look at the problem > and see how you can get Amanda to solve it for you. As I understand > it, you have a number of large level-0's, you want to retain your > backups for a long time, and your disk space is very limited. First, > I would recommend making your tapes a little bit larger, so that each > night's level-0's and level-1's can fit comfortably. This may require > reducing your retention period slightly, or getting more disk. I picked a 'virtual' tape size to match the capacity of a DVD-R: 4.3Gig, with the idea of migrating the fulls and the more major incrs to DVD-Rs for long-term archival. > > Second, since you want to use the space on your tapes to their > fullest, consider using the flush-threshold parameters to fill tapes > to 100% - there's a How To on the wiki. If you do this, you may want > to divide your vtapes by three or four so Amanda has a finer-grained > tape size to work with (that is, create three times as many vtapes, > each one-third their current size, and use runtapes=3). Hmm... I wonder: Amanda understands about using a DVD burner as a backup device. I wonder: would it make any sense to create a second configurate that is meant to backup the backup disk, but to DVD-R? And only fulls and only run once a month? If this is a workable idea, I might change the vtape size to something else, not partitularly related to the size of the archival media (DVD-Rs), and then effectively create archives using Amanda itself (mostly just merging and respliting the backup vtaps, using uncompressed tar files or something). > > Finally, lengthening your dumpcycle will allow Amanda to do more > incrementals. I don't recall the current relationship of tapecycle to > dumpcycle, but you can work that out. > > Dustin > -- Robert Heller -- 978-544-6933 Deepwoods Software -- Download the Model Railroad System http://www.deepsoft.com/ -- Binaries for Linux and MS-Windows [email protected] -- http://www.deepsoft.com/ModelRailroadSystem/
