On Tue, 28 Jan 2003 at 9:20am, John Oliver wrote

> I had three tapes for the DLT drive, and amanda seemed to be rotating
> through them just fine.  I got five more tapes, labelled them, and added
> them to the rotation.  The first weird thing is, it asked for tape 1,
> then tape 8, then tape 7, then tape 6...  Why can't it stay in order?

And amanda would ask you why can't you stay in order.  ;)

Seriously, amanda doesn't use tapes in numerical order.  It uses them in 
the order in which they were first used or, sometimes, relevant to the how 
they were labelled.  Search the archives for more on tape usage.  There 
are ways to "fix" this, but amanda's idea of order don't have anything to 
do with the tape labels.

> Next, ever since adding tapes and adjusting amanda.conf, it seems to
> constantly run out of tape, try to back up too much, etc.  I think I
> need a better understanding of exactly what the various values in
> amanda.conf mean.
> 
> Here's what I'm using now:
> 
> dumpcycle 4 days

Amanda will get a full backup of every disk list entry (DLE) at least once 
every four days.  If you run backups M-Th, Monday is going to be a busy 
day...

> runspercycle 4

You'll run amanda 4 times per dumpcycle

> tapecycle 8 tapes
> 
You have 8 tapes.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University