Mike wrote:

Under normal conditions should amanda try to fill each tape?

I want amanda to dump whatever it can up until the limit set by tapesize.

I am keeping 30 "tapes" on disk, and burning the "oldest slot" to DVD daily, and re-labeling it (so it shows as a "new" tape). I just don't want to waste any space on the dvd, or have to think about it once I get it setup.

First you have to understand that amanda is not meant to fill a tape,
but to balance the amount of data each night, as explained it the
mail by Frank Smith.

But I am trying to accomplish the same thing here.

My daily backups are about one tape in size. Some days a little over
it, other days just under the tapecapacity.  I used to run with
"runtapes 2", resulting in one full tape, and the next tape filled
with the rest; some days all would fit on one tape. The days that
amanda would need two tapes, resulted in the second tape being filled
only 1-5%, which I thought was a not an efficient use of my daily
backup tapes.

My tapes are AIT-1 tapes having 33 Gbyte capacity.
So I changed my configuration a little.

I have now in amanda.conf :

runtapes 1
maxdumpsize 40 G
autoflush on
inparallel 8
dumporder "TTTTTTTT"   # as much T's or S's as you have set inparallel
taperalgo largestfit

And a large holdingdisk on my amanda server, which contains nothing
else but amanda holding data (because I use my holdingdisk as backup
too, and having a diskcrash looses only the original or the backup
but not both).

I also modified the source of amanda to fallback to smallestfit,
once the tape is full.  This gains me another few percent tape
capacity each day.

Normally amanda schedules up to "runtapes times tapecapacity" of
data to backup. Using "maxdumpsize" overrides that value.  Now
I can force only one tape, but still allow some more data to be
scheduled.

The interaction between "inparallel", "dumporder" and "taperalgo"
is explained in:

http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=amanda-users&m=106277015010167&w=2

algo when tape at 100%).
The few gigabytes over 33 GB are not wasting a tape, but kept on
holdingdisk, and are automatically flushed the next day.

On friday the backupscript changes amanda.conf to contain "runtapes 2",
so that any amount that was accumulated during the week is flushed
to two tapes, together with the normal backup.  That way I have a
clean holdingdisk, which I need for my archive run the weekend, needing
4 tapes and a lot of holdingdisk.

--
Paul Bijnens, Xplanation                            Tel  +32 16 397.511
Technologielaan 21 bus 2, B-3001 Leuven, BELGIUM    Fax  +32 16 397.512
http://www.xplanation.com/          email:  Paul.Bijnens AT xplanation DOT com
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