On Tuesday 25 July 2006 01:29, Sebastian Kösters wrote:
>Hi!
>
>A short question.
>
>I would like to have the possibility to recover a backup thats 14 Days
> old.
>
>I want to use virtuel tapes and a tape-changer for this.
>
>Every 7 Days Amanda should do a full-backup.
>
>Am i right that i need a tapecycle of 14 a runspercycle of 13 and a
>dumpcycle of 7?
>
You'll probably want runspercycle to match the dumpcycle, that will make 
sure you have 2 generations of backups before a tapecycle of 14 would 
overwrite the 2 week old vtapes.

However, bear in mind that unless you severely constrain amanda, you 
will not have a full backup of everything on the 7th day, but on a 
disklist entry to disklist entry basis, any one disklist entry will be 
given a level 0 (full) backup ay sometime within that 7 day constraint.

Amanda wants to be frugal with the resources, so rather than making you 
buy a 300+ GB tape drive thats only filled up on Friday night with the 
rest of the weeks tapes only using <5GB of a 300 GB tape, instead 
amanda can run with a much smaller tapesize, adjusting the schedule 
such that an 8GB vtape will have 90+% usage every night.  I'm using 
vtapes here, using 180GB of a 200GB drive in 21, 8 GB vtapes to backup 
a pair of machines with a combined 120GB of drives whose partitions are 
generally over 70% used, with a tapecycle of 21, and 
runspercycle/dumpcycle of 4, so I have the ability to reach back 21 
days if I have to.  Usage of the partition the vtapes are on runs about 
85% ATM.

Amanda will work very well for those that can grok how amanda does 
things, but those users coming in from other, more manually scheduled 
backup schemes may have trouble making the transition to the amanda way 
of doing things.  Amanda is intended to be run from a crontab entry, 
and in the case of vtapes, all you have to do is read the email amanda 
sends you at the end of the run, everything else is self-contained & 
does not need human interference 99% of the time.

>If not, what must i set at tapecycle, runspercycle and dumpcycle to
> get this work?
>
>Thank you very much!
>
>Kind regards
>Sebastian

-- 
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