For archival purposes, personnaly I use a combination of your two solutions.
I use a different config of Amanda with "dumpcycle 0", "strategy noinc", but 
the main goal of a different config for me is concerning the logs: it's easier 
to restore data if your archives are not in the middle of your incremental 
backups.
Moreover if you play with the "no-reuse" option in the middle of your daily 
backups, one day you will forget to no-use a tape and erase your precious 
data...

I like my solution because I run 2 different separated configs which have no 
relation between each other, one for my daily backups and one for my archives 
when I have to archive some data.


On Wed, 22 Oct 2003 17:35:38 +0200
Toralf Lund <toralf AT procaptura DOT com> wrote:

> Reviewing the amanda config again in conjunction with a tape format 
> update...
> I forget (and list search doesn't return anything conclusive): How do 
> you people recommend handling archival runs? There are two obvious ways:
> 
>    1. Via a special config.
>    2. Using the normal config, but special labels and "amadmin ... no-reuse"
> 
> What are the pros and cons of each of these?
> 
> Note: I know that one argument against 2) is that you normally want 
> different behaviour with regard to incrementals, but that doesn't really 
> apply in my case as there are no incrementals in any case (in the main 
> config; I have a separate one for incrementals as they are written to a 
> different medium.)
> 
> - Toralf
>