Hi Gil,

Gil Vidals wrote:
> I'm new to Amanda and I'm preparing to rotate tapes for the first time.
> I have an autoloader that holds 10 tapes all under the amanda.conf as
> DailySet1. And I just ordered 10 more (new) tapes, but I'm not clear as
> to when do I pull out tapes and put in the new ones???
> 
> I currently have these dump cycle settings and my intention is for the
> fulls to occur every 5 days
>   dumpcycle 5 days       
>   runspercycle 5         
>   tapecycle 10 tapes 

your setup means:
- make sure that the last 5 tapes will hold at least one full (level 0)
of every disklist entry
- run on every day (crontab)
- you will need 7 tapes every week (if the daily run will fit on only
one tape). If you need 2 tapes a day, you will need 10 tapes every week.
- The big answer: amcheck will tell you by mail if it couldn't find a
tape to write to in your changer. Then it is time to put in your next 10
fresh tapes and label them.
- If you own 20 tapes overall, i suggest setting tapecycle to ~18.

> My crontab is set to run each day at the same time. /etc/crontab:
>   45 16 * * 1-7 amanda amcheck -m DailySet1
>   59 23 * * 1-7 amanda amdump DailySet1

your crontab means:
run another amdump on every day. means: starting on monday, you will
have a full set saturday morning. The next full set will be on tape 5
days later, which is on thursday. Is this what you want ?

> Questions:
> 1) Do I unload all 10 tapes?
>      a) if yes, then do I create a DailySet2???

You do not need to have another setup. Label all your tapes
"DailySet1-XXXX". That's it. Whenever amanda thinks there is no
writeable tape in your changer device, it will tell you after every
amcheck run and mails her thoughts to you.

>      b) if no, then which ones?

Give yourself 2-4 weeks to get in touch with how amanda works. If you
need to have a set of "full metal restore" tapes at the end of every
week, then set dumpcycle to 7 days. Set runspercycle to whatever you
need. e.g. we run amdump after every workday in the late evening, which
means: dumpcycle 7 days and runspercycle 5 days. Scheduled appropriate
by using cron.

You could set dumpcycle 7 days and runspercycle 3, too. This means
amanda will run 3 amdumps per week (and you should run amdump 3 times a
week using cron, to make amanda scheduling things right). Nothing
special, but keep in mind how much of your disklist entries (also called
DLE) will fit on tape.

However, understanding how amanda works, tooks me some weeks. You should
invest more or less time to understand, too. It's worth it !

 Cheers,
 Peter