Amanda-Users

Re: dumpcycle / runspercycle / tapecycle best practices?

2004-11-03 16:23:42
Subject: Re: dumpcycle / runspercycle / tapecycle best practices?
From: Jon LaBadie <jon AT jgcomp DOT com>
To: amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
Date: Wed, 3 Nov 2004 16:20:18 -0500
On Wed, Nov 03, 2004 at 02:44:55PM -0600, Erik Anderson wrote:
> Greetings - I'm just starting to get Amanda set up.  I have a 5-tape
> DLT7000 changer.  I've been going back and forth about how to
> structure my backup policies.
> 
> The amount of data that will be being backed up is around 10 gigs. 
> The DLTIV tapes I'm using should hold around 30 gigs, according to
> amtapetype.  I have a ton of tapes to work with - approximately 80
> tapes.  Because of the relatively small amount of data I'm working
> with and the large number of tapes, I figure that I might as well do a
> full backup every night.  Would this make sense?
> 
> That's my first question.  My second question is how to implement this
> in my amanda.conf.  I believe the following should be correct, but I
> wanted to run it by the list to see if there are any improvements:
> 
> ...
> dumpcycle 1 day
> runspercycle 1 day
> tapecycle 28 days
> ...
> 
> If I'm thinking correctly, this will force Amanda to do a full backup
> every night, and I'll have 28 days worth of full backups in the cycle.
>  Correct?

Not quite.  The tapecycle means amanda will not overwrite a tape until
27 others in the tapelist have been used.  You could actually cycle
40 or 80 tapes and leave the tapecycle at 28 or reduce it to 7.  Tape-
cycle is how soon can a tape be reused.

And, get that "day" and "days" off of the runspercycle and tapecycle lines.
They are unit-less integers.  One run per day.  Twenty eight tapes minimum
in the cycle.
Same with runspercycle.
-- 
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)