On Wed, Nov 27, 2002 at 10:11:45AM +0530, Nitesh Kumar A. wrote:
> 
> Hai Joshua:
> 
> Since level 1 backups everything since the last backup, that is level 0,
> we will get replication of files (redundancy) irrespective of whether the
> files are modified or not in the subsequent backups on the rest of the
> days. In the sense on saturday, we will get files, a, b, c, d and e too. 
> 
> So tuesday: a, b
> wed: a, b, c
> thu: a, b, c, d and so on. (irrespective of whether the files are
> modified or not. this will result in redundancy).
> 
> is there some mechanism to minimize it? y waste the tape.. .


Here we go again :))

Everyone wants to do all their level 0's on Sunday
and incrementals every other day.

Nitesh, traditional backup schemes work that way.
Amanda does not WANT to work that way.
Amanda can be coerced, kicking and screaming, into working that way.

What amanda wants is to be told is:

  - what you want to back up, your partitions, or file systems, or directory 
trees
  - how often you would like a level 0 of each of those things
  - what program, dump or gnutar you want to use
  - how often you will run amdump
  - how many tapes can be used maximum each amdump run
  - how many total tapes you have in circulation
  - a few other tidbits

Then you go away and let amanda do its thing.

It will spread a mixture of level 0's and incrementals throughout the
week trying to keep each day's total dumps about the same size on tape.
Whether on Wednesday filesystem "foo" gets a level 0 or a level 1 or ???
you need not know nor care.

As I, and others have pointed out, you can make amanda work many other ways.
But consider using amanda the way it was designed first.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
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 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)