>I'm a bit confused by all this tapecycle and dumpcycle stuff. ... That's very common. Not to worry ...
>I have a >tapedrive. 5 workingdays. I take a backup each night, meaning five >tapes: tape-000, tape-001 and so on till tape-004. What do I need as >tapecycle, and what do I need as dumpcycle? Five tapes means a tapecycle of 5. That's the easy part :-). Dumpcycle is how long (in days) between doing full dumps of a given filesystem. It's not really related to tapecycle, except that it must be less than tapecycle. Since you go back and reuse your tapes every week, it obviously cannot be any longer than that. However, for safety, you should make it less than the length of time you have before wrapping back around to the first tape. Let's say you do a full dump of client A, filesystem X onto tape-000 and you set dumpcycle at one week. The same day of the next week roles around and tape-000 is reused. Amanda decides to do the full dump again. But half way through the tape, before that filesystem is dumped or written to tape, something bad happens. At this point, tape-000 has been clobbered as far as that filesystem is concerned (that happened as soon as Amanda rewrote the label). And it had the only full dump image. So if things go really bad at this point (which, of course, they will :-) and you need to restore that area, you're in deep trouble. The best plan is to have at least two full dumps of everything so if the most recent full dump tape is bad, you can go back to the previous one. With only five tapes, and only running on weekdays, that would mean a dumpcycle of something like 2 or 3 days. Which is OK. At the very worst, I'd make dumpcycle 4 days. Finally, since you're only running on weekdays you would normally set runspercycle. That tells amanda how many amdump runs you will make during one dumpcycle. However, since you're probably going to set dumpcycle less than one week, I don't think runspercycle comes into play. If you had enough tapes to let dumpcycle be one week (or more), then you would set runspercycle to (e.g.) 5. >Tom John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
