On Jan 21, 2008 9:22 PM, Jeremy Mordkoff <jlm AT zazzletech DOT com> wrote:
> Ahhh, maybe I've already made a mess then. In reality, I only have 7 to 10 
> actual backups on each disk. After that, they were full or I had the 
> opportunity to send the backup off site, so I rotated to the next one. But I 
> pre-allocated 20 'tapes' on each disk.
>
> Another reason I want to erase them is my backups are growing, so backup #101 
> is not going to fit in the space used by backup #1. I need to erase #1 
> through #20 just to be sure I'll have room on the disk for even 1 backup.

You can use 'amrmtape' to tell amanda that a tape is gone.

What I would do in your situation is to set the tapecycle to something
fairly small -- maybe 20?  Amanda is fine with having *more* tapes
than its tapecycle.  Use a labelstr with lots of spare digits, and set
label_new_tapes so that Amanda automatically labels tapes as it
creates them.   When you cycle a disk back in from storage, use
'amrmtape' to erase records of all of the tapes on that disk, and then
wipe it clean and let Amanda start creating new tapes on it until it
fills up or is sent back offsite.

In general, this level of oversubscription is problematic.  If you
weren't so severly (20 to 1?!) oversubscribing your disks, then Amanda
could take care of the scheduling itself without having to use
amrmtape.  In the long run, I would suggest using tape spanning,
setting runtapes to something large (20?), and setting your tape
length such that 20 full tapes fit exactly on a single drive.  This
gives Amanda an accurate picture of how much space is available, so it
can do the necessary scheduling.  If you set it up this way, then as
long as you make sur the last TAPECYCLE tapes don't get overwritten,
Amanda will happily overwrite whatever "tapes" you happen to plug in
for a given run.

Dustin

-- 
Storage Software Engineer
http://www.zmanda.com