Thanks for the suggestion.  Setting record to no seems like a good idea.

However, dumpcycle set to 0 doesn't work for me.  amdump tries to run
a full backup each day.  I only use 1 or 2 tapes per amdump, and I
need 6-10 tapes for a complete archival backup.  So I need a few days
to complete an archival backup.  Setting dumpcycle to 0 seems force
the full backups to start all over again each day, which means that
DLEs are repeated.


Matt Hyclak <hyclak AT math.ohiou DOT edu> writes:

> 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

-- 
Kevin Dalley
kevin AT kelphead DOT org