On Mon, Jun 26, 2006 at 05:01:44AM -0700, Joe Donner (sent by Nabble.com) 
enlightened us:
> Thanks very much for clarifying that to me.
> 
> Yes, I meant that (at least at present) all data will fit onto one tape for
> every day of the week, i.e. if a full backup is done every day Monday to
> Friday, then Monday's full backup will fit onto one tape, Tuesday's will fit
> onto one tape, and so on.
> 
> About the second configuration for doing monthly archival backups:
> 
> 1.  I assume then that you'd have to do something once a month to prevent
> the normal Amanda backup job from running while the monthly full one is
> active?  I seem to remember I read somewhere about placing a file called
> "hold" inside an Amanda directory to cause the normal daily run to "pause"
> so it doesn't interfere with your monthly job - and so that you don't have
> to modify your cron job each time?

Yes, I usually put the Monthly tape in the drive, then schedule an at job
for later in the evening that basically does

touch /etc/amanda/Dailies/hold && amdump Monthly && rm /etc/amanda/Dailies/hold

> 2.  In other words, if you have a second configuration for monthly archives,
> then you really just happily rotate your 21 tapes for the normal daily
> backups, and then replace them one at a time either when they die naturally
> or when they've reached their "expiry date"?
> 
> Thanks again - I think this has made things "click" somewhere in my head.

Yep, that's it. 

With the Monthly archive configuration, you'll probably want to set record
to no in your amanda.conf so that your system doesn't count those as being
full dumps and messing up your schedule every month. Other than that, it's
pretty straightforward.

Matt

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