Hi, Bret,

on Dienstag, 18. Mai 2004 at 07:37 you wrote to amanda-users:

BM> I a couple servers and about a dozen PCs to backup.  Based upon my
BM> current backup, it seems that only a few GB changes every day.  I have
BM> a 20 tape DLT 80 autochanger, which should back everything up for a
BM> long time.  My tape machine also has "plenty" of holding disk space
BM> (something like 3 tapes worth/120 GB).  The servers have quite a bit
BM> of disk space on them, but the vast majority of it never changes (1
BM> server has maybe 100 GB total space that needs to be backed up, but 80
BM> GB of it is basically static).

BM> My configuration is therefore one which will waste a lot of tape if I
BM> let Amanda write a tape every night (and more importantly, it will run
BM> out of tapes and pester me in 3 weeks instead of 6 months...)

You want to run backups for 6 months with 20 tapes?
Tell us more about that, this is not clear to me ...

BM> Inspired by what I think that is telling me, I would like to do is
BM> something like this:

BM> - Run compressed backups to the holding disk
BM> - while the holding disk has > 1 tape worth of data (40 GB), write a
BM> tape.

BM> It isn't clear to me how to set it up to get this behavior.

If you really want to fill your tapes, you could set up vtapes (look
into the HOWTO-FILE-DRIVER in the docs) that are nearly as big as your
DLTs, and save the vtape-dirs with a second config to your DLTs.

I think you should just take the straight way, setup your changer,
configure a dumptype for your nearly-static stuff that has a long
dumpcycle and start going.

If you leave the tapes out, AMANDA will fill your holdingdisk, modify
the "reserve"-parameter to even get lev0-dumps in there.

-- 
best regards,
Stefan

Stefan G. Weichinger
mailto:monitor AT oops.co DOT at