From: Brian Cuttler Sent: February 4, 2014 07:42
> 
> Personally I think periodic archives are a good idea.
> Pulling the January monthly sounds like a reasonable approach.

Thanks. It is nice to have confirmation that I am on reasonable track.

> > 2. If we are to use this approach is there a way to designate a tape
> >    as not to be reused but leave it in the set or will we have to
> >    remove it from the set?
> 
> You can mark the tape "no-reuse" in the tapelist, # amadmin has an
> option to do this. Depending on your naming schema this may or may
> not cause confusing later on.

That is exactly what I am looking for. It is so straight forward I
wonder how I could have possibly missed it in my previous searches. I
guess I am just getting blind in my old age.

> You also have the option of adding tapes to the pool with different
> sufixes, or if you are running a different config, even different
> prefixes.
> 
> Annual2014, Annual2015
> MonthlyFeb, MonthlyMarch, MonthlyApril
> Daily01...Daily20 (or however large your pool is).

I had decided to avoid trying to force the tape names to match specific
days, months or years as it appeared that I would end up spending an
inordinate amount of time trying to ensure that Amanda used the right
tape on the right day. I created DailySet1 (5 tapes), WeeklySet1 (5
tapes) and MonthlySet1 (12 tapes) and named the tapes DS1-01 through
DS1-05, WS1-01 through WS1-05 and MS1-01 through MS1-12, respectively.
I then let Amanda manage which tape is used next. We keep a log both
manually and electronically of which tapes were used on which days in
case we ever need to restore from tape.

For the yearly tape I will now mark which ever tape Amanda used for
the January tape (MS1-04 this year) as NO-REUSE and then add another
tape (MS1-13 in this case) to the set and then defer to Amanda to
choose when it gets used in the cycle.

> How are you creating your monthly? Separate config, or are you
> using amadmin to force fulls for all on one weekend? Or are you
> simply pulling a tapecycle of tapes?

We are fortunate to be able to do a complete backup on one tape as we
are to have the resources to perform full backups on a regular basis
therefore we only run full backups to all tapes. Dailies are run Sunday
through Thursday night, weeklies are run Friday night and monthlies are
run Sunday nights. This greatly simplifies our scheduling and restoring
should that ever be necessary.

> How are you keeping your currently monthly's out of the re-use cycle?

We just started doing the monthly tapes so this had not come up yet.

Thanks for your very informative and helpful response.

Regards, Hugh

-- 
Hugh E Cruickshank, Forward Software, www.forward-software.com

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