On Tue, Jun 14, 2005 at 12:45:07PM +0100, Chuck Amadi Systems Administrator 
wrote:
> Hi I have 10 dat tapes that I will run per my cycle 5 per 5 day week.
> Thus every fortnight.
> I am correctly concluding I need only a tapecycle of 10 tapes
> I hope to pull out the last Friday tape in that Month to archive and
> thus label another tape to replace it.
> 
> Here's my config file.
> 
> dumpcycle 0 weeks       # the number of days in the normal dump cycle
> runspercycle 1         # the number of amdump runs in dumpcycle days
>                         # (4 weeks * 5 amdump runs per week -- just
> weekdays)
> tapecycle 10 tapes      # the number of tapes in rotation
>                         # 4 weeks (dumpcycle) times 5 tapes per week
> (just
>                         # the weekdays) plus a few to handle errors that
> 

Think of tapecycle as how many "different" tapes amanda must use
before it will reuse the first one.  In your setup, it looks like
full backups every run, tapecycle is as critical as a setup doing
mixed full and incrementals.  Set it to whatever you want, or are
comfortable, having amanda not overwrite before being allowed to
reuse.  If you want the last 10 full dumps to be sure to be around,
then set it to 10.  If the last 5 is comfortable, you can set it
to 5, but still use 10 tapes.  Amanda will only check that at least
5 are still the most recent.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
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