Hello All,

I would like to ask a general Amanda backup 'strategy' question here, given
by backup 'goals' below. I have a configured and working Amanda set-up but I
want to try and fit a backup policy that I believe is best suited to our
site around Amanda.

I have an 8-tape (DLT 35/70gb each) auto changer library linked to Amanda
via mtx, this works well.

I want to do a full backup of various file systems on a remote host once a
week and then, ideally, incremental backups once a day to that same tape. At
the end of a week's backup, the tape should switch. One week's backup is far
less than a single tape's capacity.

I would like to be able to hold 8 weeks worth of backups on tape, that is
one tape a week and then reuse the oldest tape.

I'm not sure this is possible with Amanda.. as I believe I can't append the
daily incremental backups onto the same tape as the full backups. Is it the
case that if I want to run Amanda every day that I would also have to use a
tape every day, thus meaning the tapes in the library are all used after a
week. I'm fixed in the number of tapes I can use and can't add/replace them,
so they would get reused after a week and wouldn't provide much of a 'backup
horizon'.

If this isn't possible does anyone have some suggestions? I was thinking I
could do the incremental backups to a hard disk area on the tape server each
night and then run Amanda once a week to archive the full backups plus the
HDD incremental ones.

Many thanks in advance for everyone's thoughts.

William.