On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 01:55:23PM +0100, Ranveer Attalia wrote:
>  
> Hi 
> 
> First thanks to everyone that helped me with my nightmare restore last
> week. I've managed to get the system disk up and running now so things
> are little calmer. Trying to understand the errors I recieved during the
> restore and (with the ...
> system disk restore, I eventually managed to get all the data off) 
> 

Glad you were able to get back running.

> Gavin mentioned that we shouldnt be using "day of the week"
> tape labels. Why is this? Are the results fatal if we do? 

The labels serve two masters, you and amanda.  Your label is
probably on the outside of the tape, amanda's is on the tape
itself.  So actually they don't even have to match.  Its a
mess though if they don't. :(

Amanda wants her tapes in order, doesn't matter about the label.
The order could be 1,2,3 or 293,482,111 or mon,tue,wed, or
huey,dewey,louie.  Doesn't matter to amanda.  As long as she
sees them in the same order the next time.

You on the other hand think a tape labeled 3 must follow a
tape labeled 2 (or tuesday must follow monday).  And you may
feel that a tape labeled tuesday must be used on tuesday.
Silly you.  :))

It has been the collective experience of amanda users that
any scheme to order the tapes for your purposes (not amanda's)
will get out of order.  Tapes will be added, go bad and be
replaced.  Computers will fail and a dump will be missed
or someone will forget to change the tapes or a dump that
normally takes 3 tapes one day will take 2 or 4.

So generally it is recommended that you keep your labeling
simple and don't concern yourself if eventually they don't
follow a human-based logical order.

> 
> All of our Daily and Weekly tapes are labelled with the day of the week.
> Is there any easy way that we can revert back to the Amanda way of
> labelling the tapes? If it is possible and we can revert, would we still
> beable to restore off the "day of the week" tapes that we have up until
> now if we ever need to?

If you can mentally deal with using tuesdays tape on friday, they
don't "have to be" relabelled.

One detail-intensive way to redo them is to relabel them as they
are about to be reused.  Use the "-f" option of amlabel to overwrite
the current label.  Amanda will consider the tape to be a "new" tape
and it will always use a new tape even if it is beyond the number
of tapes in the tapecycle.

To enforce this, you could mark each tape as "no-reuse".  Then amanda
will require a "new" tape each run.  Someone correct me if I am
wrong, but I believe this will preserve the index for those tapes.
Of course, after relabeling and reusing the tape you will want to
remove the tape from the database rather than just listing it as
"no-reuse" (amrmtape).

HTH
-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)