On Wed, Sep 27, 2006 at 09:06:32AM -0400, Jeff Portwine enlightened us:
> Hoping somebody can clarify something about amanda for me.
> 
> I have my backups set to run on a 3 day dump cycle with 6 tapes, running
> every evening except sunday night.  It seems to work fine, we change the
> tape each morning so over the course of a week (if I understand how amanda
> works right) we get two sets of full backups.  Sometimes we forget to change
> a tape, and most Saturdays we don't have anybody here to change the tape so
> on those days I thought that Amanda just backed up to the holding disk and
> then the next morning we could just change the tape, do an amflush, then
> change the tape again so that it would be ready for the next night.  
> 
> However, I've noticed that every time Amanda doesn't find a writeable tape
> (usually due to the tape not being changed that day) there is very little
> data written to the holding disk and the amflush is very very small.  The
> day after this, the dump is much larger than usual compensating for this.
> When we change the tapes every day, each tape is usually around 50% full.
> On a day when we forget to change the tape or are unable to change the tape
> the amflush results in about 0.5% tape useage, and the day following the day
> we did the amflush tape useage is usually 85-90%.  Is this how it's supposed
> to behave?  How can I fix it to do a normal dump to the holding disk on days
> when either we can't change the tape or we forget to change the tape?
> 
> Thanks for any explanation and/or tips.
> 

What settings do you have for your holding disk in amanda.conf? Specifically
the reserve setting.

Matt

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