On 8 Aug 2006, at 19:02, Toomas Aas wrote:

Joe Donner (sent by Nabble.com) wrote:

dumpcycle 0 (to force a full backup on every run, because all our data fit comfortably onto a single tape every night, and amdump only runs for 4.5

hours)

Lucky you :)

runspercycle 5 days (to do an amdump each day Monday to Friday)

tapecycle 21 tapes (to have 4 weeks' worth of "historical backups" + one

extra tape for good measure)

How do I now handle taking out one tape a month for long-term archiving? If my tapes are labelled daily-1, daily-2, etc., then how do I take out one tape a month but make sure that this doesn't confuse amanda, and that I will

be able to restore from that tape in the future?

Just pick the tape you want to take out of the rotation and mark it as no-reuse with amadmin.

Do I add a new tape each time in my numbering sequence?

IMHO this is the best solution. Just add in a new tape and amlabel it with next number.

Can I reuse tape labels but somehow cause amanda to not overwrite the
information needed to do restores from the archived tapes?

I guess you could maybe do this if you really want to. Copy the necessary log and index files to somewhere outside the Amanda directories, then amrmtape the archived tape and amlabel the new tape with the same label. Then you could use amrestore to restore from these tapes without indexes, or copy in the index and log directories you previously moved out of the way and use amrecover. But I think this way you would just make restoring more difficult for yourself. And restoring is the part of backup that really should be easy, because often you need to do it quickly with The Boss breathing at your back :)

In your place I would just keep on labelling new tapes with ever- increasing numbers. Actually, this is exactly what I do in my setup.

--
Toomas

Guys,

Cheers,
--
AlanP