(Quick reply, to add to what Jean-Francois wrote....) On Mon, Nov 19, 2018 at 09:15:31 -0800, Chris Miller wrote: > library experience trying to use vtape. For example, do I have to > label my vtapes, or can I tell AMANDA to label them for me since I > don't think I really care what the label says.
Keep in mind that the label the identifier Amanda uses to communicate with you about what it's doing and/or looking for. So you do care a little bit what the labels are, since you'll see them in reports, command output, etc. A common convention (i.e. Amanda doesn't require this, but it seems to work well at many sites) is to have your volume labels be all-caps versions of the config name, or something related to that, followed by a zero-padded two-or-three digit number. For example, I have a configuration called TestBackup, and in that configuration I have labelstr "^TESTBACKUP-[0-9][0-9]$" , and because I have 21 vtapes my volume labels I used are TESTBACKUP-01, TESTBACKUP-02, .... TESTBACKUP-09, TESTBACKUP-10, TESTBACKUP-11, ... TESTBACKUP-21. All tapes must be labeled before they can be used, but in recent versions of Amanda you can tell it to auto-label the tapes and thus save yourself the trouble of doing it manually, using the "autolabel" parameter in amanda.conf. Hmmm, right, this topic came up on this list back in March: check out the the thread "some suggested config parameters for backups to local disk" (e.g. https://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg49720.html or https://marc.info/?l=amanda-users&m=152190468109388&w=2 ). > And then how do I tell AMANDA that it is acceptable to re-use the > oldest vtape in the collection? There are several different settings available in v3.5 to control this, but the "amtape ... inventory" output will usually give you a quick idea as to which one is coming into play. (The traditional way is via the tapecycle parameter; the new way is via a "policy" definition.) > How do I take a vtape out of the rotation and how do I add a new tape > to the rotation? Any time you label a new tape it is added to the rotation (though when exactly in the rototation it will get used is controlled by the tapescan algorithm you are using). "amadmin CONFIG no-reuse TAPELABEL" will remove the tape from the rotation but keep it around in the catalog (i.e. if you are archiving that volume somewhere to keep permanently). "amrmtape" would be used remove the volume from the tapelist and also from the catalog (i.e. if the drive containing the vtape died and the volume no longer exists). Nathan ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- Nathan Stratton Treadway - [email protected] - Mid-Atlantic region Ray Ontko & Co. - Software consulting services - http://www.ontko.com/ GPG Key: http://www.ontko.com/~nathanst/gpg_key.txt ID: 1023D/ECFB6239 Key fingerprint = 6AD8 485E 20B9 5C71 231C 0C32 15F3 ADCD ECFB 6239
