Amanda-Users

Re: syncing amanda's non-standard schedule

2003-08-15 15:28:35
Subject: Re: syncing amanda's non-standard schedule
From: Jay Lessert <jayl AT accelerant DOT net>
To: Alexander Shenkin <alshenkin AT hotmail DOT com>
Date: Fri, 15 Aug 2003 12:26:00 -0700
On Fri, Aug 15, 2003 at 06:47:44PM +0000, Alexander Shenkin wrote:
> of week 2's backup is labelled "wednesday-2".  If I forget to replace the 
> tape one day, tuesday-2 for example, I just edit the tapelist and put 
> "tuesday-2" at the top, so amanda expects "wednesday-2" as the next tape on 
> wednesday.  no problem.

But what did you do with Tuesday's holdingdisk data?

One amanda-way-to-do-it is:

    1)  Forget to load tape.

    2)  Amanda writes backups to holdingdisk

    3)  You realize the next day you forgot to load tape, you
        amflush to the tape you should have used, then load
        the next tape.

Then you've kept to your tidy little self-imposed tape schedule, and
even better, you don't have blank/obsolete tapes sitting on the shelf
among the good tapes.  (Don't feel bad; I too like to keep to my own
tidy little self-imposed tape schedule, even though I don't *have* to.)

> This was all working great for a few weeks -- four actually.  but now i'm 
> running into problems.  Amanda won't overwrite used tapes until <tapecycle> 
> (= 20 in my case) tapes have been written to.  And, since I've skipped a 
> couple tapes, amanda doesn't want to write to "monday-1", or any other used 
> tape for that matter.

As you've pointed out, 'tapecycle 20' means "absolutely, positively,
NEVER over-write a tape until you've written 20 tapes".  Amanda is doing
*exactly* what you've ordered it to do.

> Is there a way I can get around this?

Just drop tapecycle to 15.  Then you can have as many as 5
blank/obsolete tapes scattered through the rotation.  There is
absolutely nothing preventing you from having tapecycle < length of
tapelist.

This won't work the way you want if you have a changer; amanda will
tend to rummage through the changer looking for an "optimum"
(oldest/blank) tape to use.  But IIRC, with chg-manual, it'll use what
you give it as long as you don't violate tapecycle.

-- 
Jay Lessert                               jay_lessert AT accelerant DOT net
Accelerant Networks Inc.                       (voice)1.503.439.3461
Beaverton OR, USA                                (fax)1.503.466.9472