On Thursday 13 March 2003 04:36 pm, Wayne Richards wrote:
> Well, there are a couple of options I can think of off the top of my head.
>
> 1.  Use a second config file for the weekend backups and add the line:
>       strategy noinc
>     in the dumptype definition
>
> 2.  Do a:
>       amadmin config force hostname
>     prior to running the weekly backups.
>
> Wayne

  I have to do this since I have to use a DLT-4 drive for incrementals, and an 
SDLT-220 drive for full backups.

  What I do (I should really stick this in the FAQ-o-matic) is the following:

1. Create 2 configurations, one for Full only, and one for Incremental only. 
Full is run on the weekend, and Incremental is run during the week.

2. The Full configuration has a dumptype "always-full" which defines 
"dumpcycle 0". This makes sure every partition is a level 0 dump when it 
runs. Disklist entries should be told to use a dumptype that include 
"always-full".

3. Since amanda's planner is rather tenacious about the full backups, we need 
to really make it work to give us a level 0 dump. So, in the Incremental 
config file, set tapecycle to the number of tapes you have, but set dumpcycle 
and runspercycle to something silly, like 1000. This will keep the planner 
assuming that it has lots of time before it needs to do a level 0 of any 
given partition.

4. After the full backup runs, rm -rf the incremental backup directory (where 
indexes and logs are kept) in the amanda user's home directory, and cp -r the 
full backup directory to the incremental backup directory. This will keep the 
two in sync, and restart the 1000 day count each week.

This isn't totally fool-proof. If you have a very small partition (e.g., /tmp) 
then you may often get a level 0 dump of it. For larger partitions, you will 
almost never get a level 0, but in the end it accomplishes the "full on 
weekends, incremental during week" issue that occasionally pops up without 
performing too much magic.