On Mon, Oct 01, 2007 at 08:50:59AM -0500, DavidG AT hesston DOT edu wrote:
> I'm setting up Amanda for the first time and would like to configure
> it for our existing backup strategy.  We want to do complete backups
> nightly during weekdays, i.e. Monday-Friday night.  Once a week, let's
> say Wednesday, we want to take one tape to an off-site vault and bring
> another tape back, meaning we'd be taking a tape out of the normal
> rotation and bringing another one back into the rotation.  We'd want
> to have a minimum of 4 tapes in rotation (3 here and 1 off-site),
> possibly a few more, but not a huge number of tapes.  All will be
> complete backups, no incrementals.
> 
> What parameters would work best in Amanda for doing this with a
> minimal need for manual "adjustments" during the week?  Is it possible
> to just take a tape out of the rotation for a week and give Amanda a
> different tape than it expects, or does a person have to tell Amanda
> they've done this each time they do it?
> 
> Thanks for any help or tips anyone might have!

Set your dumpcycle and runspercycle to 1.  That will do full dumps
each run.  Set your tapecycle to 1 or 2.  If set to 1, amanda will
use any available tape.  If set to 2 it will not reuse the most
recently used tape.  But all the others will be usable.  If the
tape it would prefer to use is off-site, it will use one of the
other available tapes.  You may get some messages about not being
able to use the tape it wants.

-- 
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)