I never want to overwrite, but we're supposed to
rotate them out daily.  It's possible these weren't
moved out, but my real question here is that I don't
want amanda to be dependent on the tapelist.  Do I
have to go by what the rotation is listed in
tape-list, or can I continue to put in any tape?  If I
can't, then i'll try to rearrange the tapes and the
tape list to be accurate, but since we have operators
moving the tapes, I wanted them to just put an
available tape in, rather than a specific tape.  And
by available I mean one that came back to us offsite
that can be overwritten.

> 
> Unless your dumpcycle is < 7 days, you do *NOT* want
> to over-write
> these!
> 

> > My questions are why does the backup want to use
> other
> > tapes, and why won't it just use what's in the
> drives?
> 

> Because you have set dumpcycle and tapecycle to tell
> it not to.

Can you be more specific as to how to do this?

> >  Can I get Amanda to just use whatever is in teh
> > drives and not care about a retention?
> 
> Sure, but unless you know what you're doing (and you
> don't yet), that
> is a really bad idea.
> 
This amanda setup was here before I was, and I'm just
getting to try to figure out what it does and how it
does it.

> 
> You've not said, but I'm guessing that you're
> running some sort of
> full-only configuration.
> 

We do incrementals and full once a week, but are
supposed to off-site the tapes daily.

> And I'm guessing you've set tapecycle to exactly the
> number of tapes
> you've labeled.

Yes, this seems to be true.

> 
> Amanda will decline to overwrite a tape newer than
> tapecycle runs
> old.  You can set tapecycle to 0 if you want.
> 
> Amanda will in any case also decline to overwrite
> the newest run,
> because if you do, and the current run fails, you've
> lost not one
> run, but two, right?
> 

Ok I understand.  If we fail to remove the tape and
have it overwrite daily, I will lose the day before's
data.  And if we don't remove the tape that's full, we
don't have space to do the next backup.  Any
suggestions, other than make sure we remove teh tapes
when they are full? :)

Thanks,
Adam

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! SiteBuilder - Free, easy-to-use web site design software
http://sitebuilder.yahoo.com