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.

You could also set up a separate archive configuration for Amanda, schedule it to run once a month, and make sure the schedule doesn't interfere with the normal daily runs. I prefer to have all the book keeping and indexes in one configuration, but you may have other priorities.

There are a multitude of possible ways to configure backups with Amanda. You should have enough information from running Amanda up to this point to see how much data you have to backup and how well your tape capacity, server, and network handle that. Then you put that together with your budget and decide what is going to work for you for a long term strategy.

One point I would make, though, is that recovering from backup in order to make an archive is probably not a good strategy. You would need a large enough capacity disk to handle the recovery, and you would lose the client machine information in the process, since the archive backup would only know that it came from your recovery disk.

Hopefully, my comments along with Jon's will help you decide how to configure your long term strategy.

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