On Tuesday 10 September 2002 14:29, Galen Johnson wrote:
>woohoo...I'm actually making progress...amcheck actually completed
>mostly without errors (mainly because I stupidly left the disklist
> at the default that came with amanda...silly...silly).  I also
> forgot to label my tapes (I am currently in the process of this).
>  Now the question...I have a 7 tape magazine...I'm gonna have to
> set runtapes to 2...I was planning to start sequentially labeling
> the tapes (daily000, daily001,...), should I label them 0-6 and
> then label the next magazine 7-13 or some other scheme?...docs
> aren't very clear on that.
>
>I still am not too clear on the dumpcycle, runcycle, tapecycle,
>motorcycle, etc rules yet...alas more perusing of docs...
>
>=G=

If you leave the scheduling to amanda, and not overpower her with 
the first disklist, you'll find that a good sized system can still 
be put on a single DDS2, 4 gig tape.  I'm doing a 46 gig drive here 
on one tape a night.  Amanda will adjust the schedule to level out 
the tape useage from night to night.

Don't use hardware compression because that hides the tape size from 
amanda.  Use software compression, which is usually much better at 
smunching tings anyway, and amanda who counts bytes going to the 
drive, will then know pretty exactly how much tape is available.

Don't compress that which is already compressed, it will expand 
(usually).

Label the tapes sequentialy, using a pattern you define in 
amanda.conf.  See the current define in there now.

Dumpcycle is how long amanda has to do a level 0 on everything in 
the disklist, '1 week' or '7 days' is typical.

Motorcycle?  I'm not sure amanda has that option, or even if I ever 
had a girl named Amanda on the princess pad.  But they're fun, I 
put half a million+ miles on several down thru the years, at one 
point using one for a chair car for a couple of years, rain, snow 
or shine.  Just make sure you've got a hard hat you'd trust your 
brains to, you never know when you might use it up. I used up 2 of 
them in 40 some years.  Snell rated hats obviously.

Tapecycle is how many tapes in the rotation, and one should have at 
least 2*runtapes*dumpcycle(in days) in the rotation. 3x is prefered 
by some including me in order to have at least 2 good fulls on tap 
if needed.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz  512M
99.14% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly