On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 at 6:20am, Jay Ted wrote

> I need help on figuring out how to set up the dump cycle.  The way I have 
> previously done backups is a full dump on Friday night with incremental dumps 
> Saturday through Thursday.  I keep 
> the full dumps for the past 5 Fridays, and full dumps done on the last Friday 
> of the previous 3 months.  I short, I want to have the ability to restore a 
> system to its previous state for the last 7 
> days, 5 weeks, and 3 months.   I have an Powervault 120T/DLT7000 that holds 7 
> tapes.   With compression off each tape holds about 35G.  A full dump of all 
> of my systems uncompressed 
> will fill nearly 6 tapes.  I have plenty of tapes to swap out all tapes 
> daily.  Is there an easy way to set amanda.conf up to backup like this in 
> only one configuration?  Or do I need multiple 
> configs?  I have already read the Amanda chapter of the O'Reilly Backup book. 
>  I would just like to see someone's example config who may be doing something 
> similar to what I am trying to 
> do. 

First, please fix your line lengths.  It makes it rather hard to read.

Reading the list archives, you'll see that forcing amanda into such a 
fixed schedule is rather difficult, and somewhat frowned upon.  Amanda 
likes to do its own scheduling, with the goal of eqaulizing the night's 
backups.

How many tapes do you have?  If you have 7 days*12 weeks=84 tapes, you can 
have 3 months worth of history to the daily level, with several level 0s 
of each filesystem spread throughout your tapes.  This is the easiest 
option, requiring only one config.  You could do, e.g., dumpcycle=12 days, 
runspercycle=12, tapecycle=84.

If you have 7 days*5 weeks=35 tapes + 6 tapes*3 months=18 for a total of 
53 tapes, you could do 5 weeks worth of history to the daily level plus a 
separate config doing level 0s of everything once a month.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University