On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 02:03:19PM +0100, Chuck Amadi Systems Administrator 
wrote:
> Hi Great
> 
> Yes I am going to use 10 tapes in total and reuse the first tape after
> 10 week days worth of backups.
> 
> Thus is it fine to pull the last Friday tape at the end of the Month for
> archiving and then re-label the tape I pulled.
> 
> 
> On Tue, 2005-06-14 at 08:21 -0400, Jon LaBadie wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 12:45:07PM +0100, Chuck Amadi Systems Administrator 
> > wrote:
> > > Hi I have 10 dat tapes that I will run per my cycle 5 per 5 day week.
> > > Thus every fortnight.
> > > I am correctly concluding I need only a tapecycle of 10 tapes
> > > I hope to pull out the last Friday tape in that Month to archive and
> > > thus label another tape to replace it.
> > > 
> > > Here's my config file.
> > > 
> > > dumpcycle 0 weeks       # the number of days in the normal dump cycle
> > > runspercycle 1         # the number of amdump runs in dumpcycle days
> > >                         # (4 weeks * 5 amdump runs per week -- just
> > > weekdays)
> > > tapecycle 10 tapes      # the number of tapes in rotation
> > >                         # 4 weeks (dumpcycle) times 5 tapes per week
> > > (just
> > >                         # the weekdays) plus a few to handle errors that
> > > 
> > 
> > Think of tapecycle as how many "different" tapes amanda must use
> > before it will reuse the first one.  In your setup, it looks like
> > full backups every run, tapecycle is as critical as a setup doing
> > mixed full and incrementals.  Set it to whatever you want, or are
> > comfortable, having amanda not overwrite before being allowed to
> > reuse.  If you want the last 10 full dumps to be sure to be around,
> > then set it to 10.  If the last 5 is comfortable, you can set it
> > to 5, but still use 10 tapes.  Amanda will only check that at least
> > 5 are still the most recent.


I just want to make certain I'm not confusing
your intent because of terminology.

You want to "pull" the monthly tape and
"relabel the tape you pulled".

That second part (relabelling) is a different tape,
right?  If so, it is not "relabelling" but just
an initial label for that tape.

Now, if you mean to use the same label as the one
pulled, think twice.  Amanda keeps indexes of what
is on a tape.  If you use the same label as the
pulled tape, then you will soon lose the index
for the pulled tape (when the new tape is used).

Instead, when you pull a tape, mark it a "no-reuse".
The index will be retained.  But the new tape will
need to have a different label.

In fact, you could label up 22 tapes, 10 for cycling,
12 in anticipation of pulling monthly for a year.
Your tapecycle could be set to 10, and you could
cycle through your first 10, or all 22.  Amanda will
still ensure that the most recently used 10 are not
overwritten.  Monthly, just pull whichever of the
22 was used.  You will have a "hole" in your tape
cycle, but amanda won't care.

But maybe the human (you) will :))  If so, set your
label scheme up to be something like DS-xx.y where
xx is your ordering sequence and y is which replac-
ment.  Maybe you label up DS-01.0 to DS-10.0.  At
the end of the month, say you have to "pull" DS-05.0
Mark it as no-reuse and label up a new DS-05.1.  This
preserves your ordering and tells you it is a tape
not in the initial cycle.  Might be important for
some tapes (eg. DAT) which have a fairly short life.

Just some ideas.

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