On Mon, Mar 31, 2003 at 05:31:02PM +0200, Lucia Mazzoni wrote:
> Hi everyone,
> I need a little help to tune a backup plan with Amanda.
> In my company we were used, before Amanda, to have this plan for our 
> main servers (each one with a dedicated tape device):
> - a full backup was made every day from monday to friday but
> 1) from monday to thursday tapes were always the same, that is, every 
> week they were overwritten
> 2) on friday we had 4 tapes to save a full-backup per week for one 
> month. After 4 weeks we selected the oldest tape, put it in a safe place 
> (against fire) and took a new one for the backup job.
> We kept 1 tape per month for 6 months and then one every 3 or 6 months.
> 
> Now I'd like to maintain the same plan with Amanda and my problem is 
> with Friday tapes that I want to "extract" and put away.
> 
> I put a tapecycle of 4 tapes on Friday configuration but:
> - How can I maintain the possibility of restore data from the extracted 
> tapes? Changing labels every time?
> 

I'm guessing some things about your old setup and if wrong forget my idea.

Guesses:
The systems in question do not have tape changers.
It was operator responsibility to see that the correct tape was in the drive.
If the wrong tape was inserted, the previous backup system would just overwrite 
it.

If that is the case, how about setting tapecycle, dumpcycle, and runspercycle
to one.  Amanda will always take a new tape whose label meets the pattern
and with those settings will reuse any previous tape -- I think.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
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