On Mon, Apr 17, 2006 at 12:15:07PM +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
> I'm not having any problems with amanda, but the results do seem 
> 'over-the'top' for my needs, which leads me to wonder whether I need to 
> change some parameters.
> 
> At the moment there are three DLEs.  One is a backup of the whole /home with 
> a 
> few exceptions, and that is quite big, around 21GB.  The other two are 
> relatively small, less than 1GB each.  The amount of data that changes in a 
> day is quite small.  The DLEs are set to a 4-day rotation, but in practice I 
> am seeing level 0 backups almost every other day, for all of them.
> 
> It would seem reasonable, to me, based on the small amount of changes, to 
> have 
> a level0 weekly, for all of them, I think.
> 
> There are other areas that I haven't been including, but intend to.  These 
> consist of home video, so contain a few large files in each directory.  These 
> do not change at all, so only new material would need to be backed up.  I'm 
> thinking that maybe I should comment out everything else and run a backup on 
> the video directories only when new material is added, then comment out the 
> video DLEs and continue with normal ones afterwards.  Would that be sensible?
> 
> I did wonder if it was possible to define a completely separate set of 
> parameters for these video directories, using a monthly rotation, say, but I 
> get the impression that that's not possible.
> 
> I'd be glad of any advice, hints and tips, for tackling these issues.


The combination of a low number of DLEs and greatly varying sizes
for those DLEs will always cause the promotion problems you are
seeing.  Amanda is trying to "balance" the amount of work done
daily and if you are trying to average say 6 GB/day (made up #)
then you don't promote the 21 GB DLE, you promote the small ones.

Approaches to rework your setup more to your liking include (but
are not limited) to:

- breakup /home into several DLEs, like [a-h]*, [i-m]*, etc.

- reduce promotion with maxpromote?days?, possibly eliminating it

- I think there is a parameter specifying minimum number of days
  at an incremental level, but maybe only affects bumping to next
  incremental level

- for static data, I have such a beast, a file system of iso images
  of OS installation CDs, I set that DLE to strategy full dump only

- don't hold me to this, but I think dumpcycle can now be specified
  as a dumptype parameter as well as a global parameter

-- 
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)