Anwar Ruff wrote:

1. Is it possible to force amanda to use one tape -- writing to it in
 a contiguious manner (i.e., not overwriting it every dump)?

Currently not.  That's by design.  Now and then people come in
and want such a feature to be added, but nobody ever had the
energy to add such a feature (and if the feature existed, the
default would still be at least one tape for each run).
It is a bad feature, because you're never sure someone/something
resets the tapedrive between two runs, resulting in a rewound tape.
The next run would happily overwrite the tape from the beginning.
Currently Amanda can avoid this in one run by keeping the tapedrive
filedescriptor open.  It's much more difficult (impossible?) to do
the same between multiple runs.  Even simple problems like checking
the label of the tape become complicated.

A solution many people follow is this.  Buy a very large disk as
holdingdisk (a simple IDE disk is good enough, you don't need
some superfast rocketscience scsi disk).  Set the "reserve"
parameter to something less than 100 (e.g. zero). Do not insert
a tape for many runs, up to the point that you think it's worth
to flush the backups collected on holdingdisk to tape all at once.

> 2. As I am quite new to AMANDA in general I would greatly appreciate
> any suggestions one could provide in helping me optimize my current

Is there really any need to do two fulls/week?  Then you have to
set dumpcycle to 3 days, instead of 1 week.  (If you ask me, one full
dump each week is just fine.)

And your tapecycle is actually 3 tapes, not 1.  (You can always feed
amanda more tapes than specified in your tapecycle, but amanda will

You didn't specify "runspercycle". If omitted it's equal to dumpcycle,
in your case 1 week = 7 days = 7 times. May be "runspercycle 5" is
fine too (adjust your crontab accordingly).

If you want to collect the images on the holdingdisk (by not inserting
a tape, or leaving the old tape in the drive), and then flush to
tape in one go, you have to change the reserve from the default of 100%
to something else.  I would suggest "reserve 0".
And you can add the "autoflush" parameter: then amanda will flush the
holdingdisk to tape automatically when it starts the next amdump.

You have 3 clients, and specified "inparallel 4".  In this case
only 3 dumpers will run in parallel at most. Probably 2, because
your windows host is backed up I guess by using one of the linux
clients as smbclient agent too.  If your hardware is fast enough,
you can add "maxdumps 2" (or more).  And in this case, I would
definitely change the spindle-number to something that reflects
reality.

I assume 'high' in the disklist means high priority. If everything
is 'high priority', then there is no priority at all.  I would give
the userdata high priority and the system data less.  (The priority
only comes into account when choosing what to backup in favour of
something else when you're near tapecapacity).

I see no dumptype "holdingdisk". Does that mean that your holding
disk is not backed up (FINE!), or that one of your entries is your
holdingdisk, and you're making a recursive backup of that too (WRONG!).
Just checking.

--
Paul Bijnens, Xplanation                            Tel  +32 16 397.511
Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUM    Fax  +32 16 397.512
http://www.xplanation.com/          email:  Paul.Bijnens AT xplanation DOT com
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