> If you run it 7 days a week then what you have is fine.
Cool, I am running it every night.

To answer your questions,
> How much data do you want backed up
currently I would like to plan for 35GB, one full tape, but it is under
10GB (I think, could be a little more)
> how long is your backup window
as long as I need, currently I run at midnight and an hour or two is
just fine
> how old can the data be on a restore and still be acceptable
one week is fine by me, I am more concerned about getting last nights
backup than last weeks (I am sure this will bite me later)
> will you ever need to restore data previous to the last backup, etc.
not at the moment, not from tape. I do have a RAID 5 system that I
backup to as well (and this is included in the Amanda tape backups)

It would be great if each tape is one days worth of backups, I have a
ton to read now that I know about "the chapter" so I may change my mind
on this later, but as it stands now a full backup each day is what I am
looking at doing.

Thanks for your time,

Jay



-----Original Message-----
From: Frank Smith [mailto:fsmith AT hoovers DOT com] 
Sent: Monday, November 03, 2003 3:54 PM
To: Jason Lavigne; amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
Subject: Re: recommended dumpcycle, runspercycle and tapecycle

--On Monday, November 03, 2003 15:13:44 -0500 Jason Lavigne
<jlavigne AT bwlogic DOT com> wrote:

> (I have a few questions and figured I would split them up as opposed
to
> asking all in one email)
> 
>  
> 
> To be very honest, I have no idea what these values should be for my
> setup, I have the Adic VLS DLT7000 with 7 tapes in it and I would like
> to have the ideal setup, I have a couple spare tapes but I don't
really
> have the resources to buy any more tapes so I would like to rotate
> between these 7 (or 6, see below) tapes.  
> 
>  
> 
> dumpcycle 6 days
> 
> runspercycle 6
> 
> tapecycle 7 tapes

If you're running 6 days per week and not running it 1 day, I would
suggest changing dumpcycle to 7.  If you run it 7 days a week then
what you have is fine.

> 
> Side note: I am keen on placing a cleaning tape in to the final slot
but
> wouldn't know how to setup Amanda to know about and take advantage of
> the cleaning tape. As it stands now I clean the drive once a week
> manually. Any suggestions about this would be greatly appreciated.

The answer to 'the best values' would be 'it depends'. How much data
do you want backed up, how long is your backup window, how old can the
data be on a restore and still be acceptable, will you ever need to
restore data previous to the last backup, etc.
   If you aren't currently using much of your tape, you could shorten
your dumpcycle and runspercycle to 3 days and give yourself two fulls
per week instead of one.

Frank
>  
> 
> TIA
> 
>  
> 
> Jay
> 



-- 
Frank Smith                                      fsmith AT hoovers DOT com
Systems Administrator                           Voice: 512-374-4673
Hoover's Online                                   Fax: 512-374-4501