Lloyd,

Highly recommended that you have at least 2x times the number
of runs as dump cycle, else you run the risk of overwriting
the only level 0 of any particular partition.

Can you run dumpcycle of 5 rather than 10 ? Depends on the
amount of data you are dumping and the capacity of your tapes.
Probably yes but I don't know the particulars.

There has been a lot of discussion (archives are online) and
what I believe is often done (and I do _not_ do this myself)
is to have a separate amanda run or runs that perform level 0
on all partitions and to a separate tape pool. The are a
couple of strategies to do this, somewhat depending on your
tape pool/capacity etc.

> Brian Cuttler wrote:
> > You have a tape cycle of 10, what is your dump cycle ? Certain less than
> > 10, hopefully less than 5. 5 given one untouched copy of the your level
> > 0 backup while the older level 0 is being overwritten (assuming a single
> > level 0 per dump cycle).
> 
> the dump cycle, runs per cycle, and tape cycle are 10.
> 
> 
> > What are you trying to do ?
> 
> just ensure there is some kind of snapshot history going back, say three 
> months, in case i need to reach into the distant past for a file.  maybe 
> a once-weekly snapshot...
> 
> 
> > Are you looking for periodic level 0 that are outside of the
> > normal tape pool or rotation ?
> 
> i think this is what i'm after.  perhaps combine this with your 
> suggestion to lower the dump cycle to < 5 ?  can i just change this 
> value in amanda.conf?
> 
>