On Thursday 02 February 2006 10:01, Jon LaBadie wrote:
>Kind of a "best practice" or "common usage" query.
>
>For those of you using vtapes, how have you chosen
>to specify the size of a single vtape?
>
>A while ago, perhaps 1-2 yrs when vtapes were starting
>to be used more regularly, the comments seemed to be
>"divide the available space by the number of vtapes".
>This ensured that the file system would never run out
>of space but meant that some available space is "wasted".
>
>In contrast, when I 'played' with vtapes a year or more
>earlier, I just specified a huge size, knowing it would
>"never" be exceeded.  However a possibility was that I
>would run the file system out of space if many vtapes
>were pretty full.
>
>Gene H., as I under stand it, uses a third variation.
>He wants X number of vtapes and wants them pretty full.
>To achieve this he adjusts the dumpcycle & runspercycle
>parameters.
>
>How are current users sizing their vtapes and what has
>been their experience in disk usage?
>
> (: can you tell I'm thinking about using vtapes :)

Yup.  My method is of course not the only way to skin this particular 
cat, there not being the possibility of offsite storage, but so far its 
worked well for me.  FWIW I also have lowered the var that controls how 
many days a given incremental level is used to 1, but at the end of the 
day I believe it had a minimal effect while using tar 1.15-1.  How STar 
would handle that I haven't investigated.  Has anyone?

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.