On Tue, May 14, 2002 at 09:59:45AM +0100, Niall O Broin wrote: > and asked for #15 for tonight. From what I've read before, amdump will use > the last tape in the tapelist marked reuse (incidentally, every tape in my > tapelist is marked reuse - is that correct ?) so what exactly does the > tapecycle parameter do ? If there are less than tapecycle tape in the > tapelist will it force amdump to ask for a new one ?
Yep. A tape must be at least <tapecycle> tapes old before amanda will agree to reuse it. So for you, with tapecycle set to 14, amanda will refuse to overwrite the last 14 tapes that have been used. > I've got a large holding disk so I may well change runspercycle to 14 and > run amdump every day and then run amflush on Monday in order to have as many > backups as possible (and people may sometimes do some work at weekends). If > I do that and the amount of data in the two holding directories on Monday is > small enough, is it OK to amflush ALL to one tape or am I better off > flushing each day to a separate tape, which would give the same nett result > as if the tapes had been put in the drive over the weekend ? I always amflush everything to a single tape. AFAIK, the only disadvantage to doing it that way is that, if that one tape goes bad, you're losing more backups. (And, similarly, if you do what you're talking about and your holding drive dies on Sunday night...)
