Gasp... Urg.. Ahh.  Do you not have sufficient disk space for this
buffering action?  It helps write speeds quite a bit, particularly on
slower machinery where the tape drive may shoe-shine if fed the data
too slowly.

With holdng disk (20-60GB) sized drives being commodity items these
days, I'd make a bit of noise at TPTB to get one if you cannot find
space on the existing system for these temporary files.

I have about 25Gb free on / and I'm just using a dir called '/dumps'
in that filesystem for a holding disk, and it works fine.

>Since I'm just backing up the local server machine, I dump it
> straight to the tape.  I assume that this is fine, as amanda should
> realize that if the dump didn't occur, it needs to do an
> incremental or whatever based on the last successful backup
> (monday-2 in this case), no?
>
>As far as the tape changer goes, I'm ok, since I just have a single
> tape machine.  Good info for the future tho, thanks.
>
>And I'm glad you too have a nicely organized little set of tapes
> going there.  i don't feel all alone in the world anymore.  ;)
>
>Allie
>
>>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
>
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--
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz  512M
99.27% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2003 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.

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