On Thu, Jul 14, 2005 at 01:06:38PM -0600, Graeme Humphries wrote:
> On Thu, 2005-07-14 at 20:57 +0200, Gregor Ibic wrote:
> > yes. should it be 2 ?
> 
> It should be the number of tapes you have in a cycle, AFAIK.
> 
> > But I want to use everyday full backups on new tapes, in cycle of 
> > reusable tapes

Clarify a minor language problem here.
"new tapes" and "reusable tapes" don't seem to go hand-in-hand.

After a day's backup, will the tapes go into an archive, never to
be used again?  Or can amanda uses them again at some future time
after a number of tapes have already been used?


> So you want full backups every day, onto a different tape every day?
> 
> I'd think the easiest way to set this up would be to set tapecycle to
> the number of tapes you have in rotation, or the number of tapes your
> changer can hold, and then use the dumptype option "strategy noinc".

Rather than 'strategy noinc', to get a level 0 backup each run use
'dumpcycle 0'.  I'm pretty sure 'noinc' will simply skip the incrementals
between level 0's.  I use 'noinc' for directories of CD images.  They never
change, why bother with incrementals.


Gregor, if you want to loop through a set of tapes, never overwriting any
of them until all have been used, then set tapecycle to the number of
tapes you have in the rotation.

For example, if you have 10 tapes and set tapecycle to 10, amanda will
not reuse the first tape until after it has used 10 tapes.  Amanda will
use new tapes anytime.  But it is restricted from reusing a tape until
at least tapecycle other tapes have been used.  So if you set tapecycle
to 1, amanda is free to use any other tape immediately.

If you really mean to use fresh tapes each run, then set tapecycle to
some monsterously high number, say 100000.  At 2 tapes per day it will
be a long time before it is allowed to reuse the first.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)