On Mon, Jun 20, 2005 at 03:50:41PM -0700, Kevin Dalley enlightened us:
> I'm trying to run an archival backup which I run every 6 months or
> so.  I hope to have a full backup of everything every 6 months.  This
> is in addition to my standard backup, which includes incrementals, run
> almost every week day.
> 
> It isn't working as I expect.
> 
> My daily amanda backup, however, is running fine.
> 
> Here are the parts of the amanda.conf which I think are relevant.  I'm
> skipping the other 400 lines for now, though I will to post more lines
> if someone needs more information.
> 
> I'm using amanda 2.4.5b1, with a couple of small changes I made.
> 
> The symptoms are that the same DLEs are backed up repeatedly, not
> finishing the entire list of DLEs.  The DLEs aren't exactly the same
> each day, but large DLEs are frequently backed up.  I use a different
> config for the archival backups than I do for the standard backups.
> 
> 
> dumpcycle 178 days
> tapecycle 2000            # number of tapes in rotation.
> runtapes     2          # number of tapes used
>

You probably want dumpcycle 0 here.

> define dumptype default {
>       dumpcycle 100
>       maxcycle 0
>       skip-incr yes
>       strategy noinc
>       record yes
> }

I'm not familiar with maxcycle. Again dumpcycle should probably be 0 to
force a full each time you run it. That said, you can probably leave out the
skip-incr and strategy noinc. 

Setting record to yes will mess with your regular daily cycle. Just make
sure that's what you want.

If I had to guess what's happening, is that it is selecting certain DLEs to
be level 0's and they get backed up. The others are incrementals, so
skip-incr is telling amanda ignore them. IIRC, strategy noinc is not
implemented yet. That's why you're only seeing certain DLEs get backed up.
Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

For reference, my monthly archive is defined as:

dumpcycle 0
runspercycle 1
tapecycle 13 tapes (I'm on tape 8 currently, I'll increase this as I get more)
runtapes 1

define dumptype global {
  index yes
  record no  
}

Matt

-- 
Matt Hyclak
Department of Mathematics 
Department of Social Work
Ohio University
(740) 593-1263

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