Lloyd, Highly recommended that you have at least 2x times the number of runs as dump cycle, else you run the risk of overwriting the only level 0 of any particular partition.
Can you run dumpcycle of 5 rather than 10 ? Depends on the amount of data you are dumping and the capacity of your tapes. Probably yes but I don't know the particulars. There has been a lot of discussion (archives are online) and what I believe is often done (and I do _not_ do this myself) is to have a separate amanda run or runs that perform level 0 on all partitions and to a separate tape pool. The are a couple of strategies to do this, somewhat depending on your tape pool/capacity etc. > Brian Cuttler wrote: > > You have a tape cycle of 10, what is your dump cycle ? Certain less than > > 10, hopefully less than 5. 5 given one untouched copy of the your level > > 0 backup while the older level 0 is being overwritten (assuming a single > > level 0 per dump cycle). > > the dump cycle, runs per cycle, and tape cycle are 10. > > > > What are you trying to do ? > > just ensure there is some kind of snapshot history going back, say three > months, in case i need to reach into the distant past for a file. maybe > a once-weekly snapshot... > > > > Are you looking for periodic level 0 that are outside of the > > normal tape pool or rotation ? > > i think this is what i'm after. perhaps combine this with your > suggestion to lower the dump cycle to < 5 ? can i just change this > value in amanda.conf? > >
