AFAIK, AMANDA never formats tapes. They are rewritten from block 1, but not
formatted or retensioned.

If you keep all your old backup reports, you can figure out how many times a
tape has been used, and replace it when the time comes. If you'd like to add
tape aging features to the software, please joing the amanda-hackers mailing
list. I don't remember that being on the wish list, but I don't think anyone
would complain about a useful feature, either. 

For my DDS3 tapes, I run them until I get errors on a tape twice in a row.
Then it gets discarded. I have a stack of spares that I inherited, so
replacements are easy. I also test restoring a random tape every month, so I
know I'm not just blindly casting my bits to the ether.


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Keith Nasman [mailto:keith AT ahapala DOT net]
> Sent: Thursday, September 05, 2002 6:45 PM
> To: amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
> Subject: Tape retirement
> 
> 
> 
> So you've got this pool of tapes that amanda rotates through. 
> Does amanda 
> keep track of the number of formats to the tapes and alert 
> you to ones 
> that should be retired?
> 
> If amanda doesn't keep track of this what strategies are 
> prevalent for 
> DDS3 DAT tapes?
> 
> Thanks,
> Keith
>