zuki wrote:

There are a number of issues here that are hard to answer without more information about your setup, volume of data and budget. These are things that every backup administrator has to answer, and there is no particular "right" answer. One issue is how and when to do archives with Amanda. It's necessary to realize that if you do an archive (say monthly), it is a snapshot in time. There will be files that existed in between archives that are not on the archives. I have arbitrarily decided to do archives at the end of semesters, because I'm in an academic setting, and, typically, data, accounts, etc. are likely to cycle before the beginning of the next semester. During a semester, things are more fluid. I run a 6 week cycle of tapes to give me fairly solid coverage in case I need to recover something. I also tell faculty and staff that if they lose something, the sooner they tell me, the better.

I have, in the past, just marked some tapes for no-reuse after examining the reports to make sure every DLE was represented by a full on that set of tapes. Then I add more tapes to fill out the cycle. I'm planning on a slightly different tactic this Christmas. On a long weekend I'm going to force all the DLEs to full, let it run its course, and then retire that tape (or tapes) for archive by marking them no-reuse. I'll probably keep end of semester archives for at least 2 years.

Once upon a time (mid 1990's), I ran daily backups (typical combination of fulls and incrementals) and never re-used or discarded a tape, ever. In that situation, I could go back to any day in the history of the company and recover a file from any computer. But, I always had to buy new tapes every month. With the explosion of data and storage capacities, that is harder to do now. It takes much larger backup capacity and higher budgets. If you have terrabytes of data, you're talking serious money, and the bean counters are going to want to balance the cost.

So, you filled(?) your 30 days of tapes, and now you want to put that somewhere before you begin to fill another 30 days worth. How much data is that? And where did you figure on storing it? If you are using tapes in the first place, it seems fair to assume you don't have that much excess disk space sitting around. If you want it all, then you could just keep adding new tapes to your cycle. If you are not filling the tapes, you could use a holding disk, configure Amanda so that it would do both fulls and incrementals to the holding disk, and then only put a tape in when the holding disk was approaching full. Amanda would automatically flush it all out to tape on the next run (on the other runs you'd get tape errors, but it would do the backups to the holding disk). If your data capacity allowed you to put a tape in only once a week, then 52 tapes would run your backups for a year.

Yes. my tapes are 30 tapes and I want to put that somewhere before I
begin to fill another 30 days worth. The data is around 300GB and I want
to restore it in same HDD just take them out from tapes. I am not using
tape but using HDD (tapeless).

Why do you want to move them somewhere else to the same disk?
Why you don't keep them in places and just create 30 new vtape slots?
It will allow easy restoration if you need it.

Jean-Louis