On Thursday 05 September 2002 08:34, Thomas Kirk wrote:
>Hey there listmembers
>
>Im kind of newbie within the backup area so maybe this isnt so
> special after all?
>
>I wanna do a full backup every weekend and incremental rest of the
>week which lead me to have
>
>dumpcycle 7
>
>now the trouble is this will make amanda do full backups on sunday
>right? The problem is that we are doing our backup over a dslline
>which we can't transfer a full backup over in just one day? Whats
> the solution for that? What i would like is begin the full backup
> on friday afternoon (when everybody is off for weekend) and
> continue over the weekend makeing full backup. Start monday with
> incremental backup and rotate again the next friday?
>
>Another thing is a full backup in this case is more than a
> tapefull whats the solution for that?

That "fixed schedule" s not the design target for amanda. Amanda 
wants to be in charge of the scheduleing.  And she does it in a 
manner that, when you set the dumpcycle to be 7 days, will 
guarantee that each entry in the disklist will be covered by a full 
backup at some point in those 7 days.  The idea is to try and 
equalize the amount of data put on tape each night.  This also gets 
around the full is too big for the media problem very nicely.  I'm 
backing up over 40 gigs of stuff here, on 120 meter DDS-2 media, 
and the individual nights tape averages maybe 55% used.

The general solution for someone who wants a weekly offsite backup 
would be to go ahead and set the dumpcycle to 7 days, but have 14 
or 21 tapes (plus a couple for spares in case a tape gets damaged) 
in the tapecycle so that last weeks can be brought in for re-use in 
the following 7 days and this weeks 7 day collection can be taken 
home, always on the same day of the week, thereby guaranteeing that 
you have a full backup offsite.  With 21 tapes, leave 14 of them 
offsite except when doing the exchanges, bring in the oldest set of 
7 for reuse.

 It also means that if one tape is foobar, you still have most of 
your data because its spread over several tapes with no one tape 
being the key to a full backup image.

Left to her own devices, amanda will do a very good job of 
safeguarding your data, we think its the best in the business, but 
she does like to do it her way.  Amanda cannot span a partition 
image across more than one tape, but if the media should fill, she 
will restart from zero that failed dump on the next tape if given 
permission to use more than one tape per run, see the runtapes 
option in amanda.conf.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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