On Wed, Jul 23, 2008 at 9:16 AM, Andre Brandt <brandt AT decoit DOT de> wrote:
> I've configured our tape backup with amanda a few weeks ago. Everything is
> fine - the backup is done every night without any problems. The problem is,
> that our office is closed from time to time. And if the tape isn't changed,
> amanda waits until the right tape is inserted and after that the backup
> starts. Is it possible to configure amanda to anyway start the backup and
> use the holding disk although right the tape isn't inserted? So that, for
> example, one or two backup jobs are written to disk and after the tape were
> inserted, they will be written to tape?

I assume you're using chg-manual?  There are some timeout knobs you
can turn in that script, which are set to very long durations (days)
by default.  If you dial those down to, say, a few hours, and make
sure that when you *are* present, you change the tapes within that
time, you should be OK.

By the way, even while Amanda is waiting for a tape, it is spooling
dumps to holding disk.

If you know the days the office will be unstaffed, you can also run
  amdump Conf -o tapedev= -o tpchanger=
to avoid even requesting a tape.

Dustin

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