On Wed, Jul 14, 2004 at 06:20:36AM +0800, Jay Ted wrote:
> Hello, 
>  
> 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. 
>  

If you always do what you've always done,
you will always have what you've always had.

Consider trying the scheduling that amanda was designed to do.
Namely it decides which days each disklist entry (DLE, nominally
a file system) receives a level 0 and what incremental it gets
other days.  The aim is to have the administrator give broad
specs, as in maximum time between level 0's for each DLE, and
let amanda worry about the specifics.  When balanced, amanda
will be able to backup about the same amount of data (as in
tape usage) each dump run.  No one hour backups Sat-Thur and
twelve hours on Fri, but two hours nightly.

I started out with a 1 week dumpcycle for everything and later
fine tuned some DLE's to only doing the level 0's, never any
incrementals as they never seem to change, others extended
to 2 weeks with incrementals too, and some shortened them to
3 days as they vary more rapidly and I wanted the level 0's
closer together.

jl
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
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