Amanda 2.6.1, RHEL 5.3

Hi All:

To start with I am new to Amanda so please be gentle<g>.

I have been successful at getting Amanda up and running with our HP
MSL2024 LTO4 tape library. Where I am having problems is determining
how to define the sequence in which the tapes will be written. I have
spent the last several hours pouring over the documentation, the wiki,
the man pages and numerous Goolge searches but the answer seems to be
eluding me or I am just not seeing it (a very real possibility). Could
someone give me a push (or maybe a hard shove) in the right direction?

Here is some background info (if required):

1. We are planning on doing a nightly full backup of selected
   directories. A single tape will be more that sufficient to hold
   the data for the foreseeable future so spanning will not be required.
   I am more concerned with the automatic rotation of tapes.

2. I created a single backup set (so far) as follows:

   amserverconfig DailySet1 --template tape-changer \
   ?-tapedev /dev/nst0 --changerdev /dev/sg1 \
   --mailto pgiadm AT forsoft DOT com \
   --dumpcycle 0 --runspercycle 1 --tapecycle 2 --runtapes 1

3. I changed the labelstr in the amanada.conf to:

   labelstr "^DS1-[0-9][0-9]*$"

4. I labelled 5 tapes as follows:

   amlabel DailySet1 DS1-01 slot 1
   amlabel DailySet1 DS1-02 slot 2
   amlabel DailySet1 DS1-03 slot 3
   amlabel DailySet1 DS1-04 slot 4
   amlabel DailySet1 DS1-05 slot 5

5. I set the disklist to (to start with):

   pgips2 /home user-tar

6. My first amdump started with tape 5 and then the next went to 1
   and then back to 5 and now just uses 5 (and does not dump anything).

I suspect that part of my problem (probably a large part) is conceptual.
We have plenty of tape and processing time and I was looking for a full
backup on each amdump execution. I am not really interested in doing
full and incremental backups but I am aware that this contrary to the
"amanda" way of doing things. That being said, I do not really see the
need within our setup for incremental backups. The largest part of our
backups will be large databases which will be included in each and
every incremental so why bother with incrementals? I know that is
sacrilege but, hey, I am an all or nothing sort of guy<g> (and getting
rather "punchy" at the end of another 12-14 hour day).

But I see I have digressed. Back to my original question: How do
define the sequence tapes are to be used?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.

TIA

Regards, Hugh

--
Hugh E Cruickshank, Forward Software, www.forward-software.com