I am about to deploy Amanda for a customer, and there are
some concerns that the end-users responsible for  inserting the
correct tapes may not be up to the task.

In detail:
     - users will not read the daily email telling them which
        tape is expected and want to have a scheme as simple as
        possible
     - users will not understand that 18 tapes make a 3 week cycle
        (assuming weekday backups only). Ie, the 'a few extra tapes'
        may be confusing

        read the emails. They will want to be told exactly which tape
        to insert (or better deduct using dead simple reasoning)
     - should a tape need to be skipped (for whatever reason) and
        eg tape 15 follow tape 13, thsi will later confuse the users as
        the sequence will get jumbled.

is to be used andwhy is the sequence not like ...

My boss sugegsted a simple scheme of
        Week 1 Monday
        Week 1 Tuesday
thru
        Week 3 Thursday
        Week 3 Friday

I understand that Amanda's way of labelling and rotating tapes in a non
fixed manner is superior, but may be beyond the users' grasp.   

From what I can see there is no real way to make a scheme like the

above work (such that Amanda internally uses the same labels as are on
the tapes themselves. I know one could have two labels on the stickers,
but that defeats the purpose as the Amanda reports would not use the same
as the users..)

Has anyone grappled with similar situations and found any help?

I was thinking that it would be nice if Amanda had a more flexible
way of labelling tapes (ie a mapping between internal rotation labels
and human readable ones).

I am considering:
        dumpcycle 1 weeks
        runspercycle 15
        tapecycle 15 tapes
to make it match 3 5 day weeks as near as possible.

Will that get me nearer my goal? I believe that a simple
tapelabel -> human-label mapping
should be easy to add, but will it be useful in the view
that in future one may need to retire some tapes (due to
wear, loss, archiving etc) and have to add replacement tapes
that then exactly fit the  proper human-readable scheme?

Is it in fact possible to replace eg tape 13 when it dies
with another tape 13 and to re-use that exactly in the
same sequence? I suspect one will have to at least
force a new level 0 of everything that isnot due so that
one does not lose out?


How can I make Amanda ask for a tape by name even
if I just started the first cycle( in which case it
always requests a 'new tape' wven though all tapes are
already in the tapelist after beinglabelled)?
Would it help to edit tapelist to put dummy dates against
each one to make it thing the so far unused tapes
have in the past been used and are up for re-use in
the normal cycle, or will that confuse other parts of
Amanda (eg the balancing, history etc)?

Any insight is appreciated

Mathias