On Fri, May 07, 2004 at 10:03:10AM -0600, Chris Cameron wrote: > I'm hoping someone here will be kind enough to help me teach Amanda > about our tape rotation. I've read through man pages and mailing lists, > but it seems the way Amanda deals with tapes doesn't lend itself well to > our rotation schedule. > > I'll spare you a complete explanation of our backup system, and just > tell you where I've run into trouble. > > Tapes used on Thursday are sent offsite, and we receive an old offsite > tape back to use for next Thursday. The tape we write to each Thursday > is from 4 months earlier for that same week (so 3rd week of May, we get > the tape used the 3rd week of January). > > On the last Thursday of every month, rather than write to an old tape we > take a new tape and send it offsite, never to return (we hope). > > > So, the tact on this I've taken is trying to use different > configurations, which works well. However the problem I have is that > some months will have 5 thursdays, while others only 4. What this meant > in the past was some tapes made on the final (non-permanent offsite) > week would stay offsite until another month came around with 5 Thursdays > in it, which at times can be at least a year. > > > Is there any chance of getting Amanda to ask for the right tapes with > this kind of setup? Do I have any alternatives? Up until now I'd just > kill the tapelist file and start over. >
Amanda will always accept a newly labeled tape. Even if asking for a different tape. Given that, could you set your tapecycle to exactly the number of tapes in onsite/offsite rotation, sounds like it is about 17 or 18 (4 months). Don't label them "week 1 of month", but just 1 to 17. Amanda will ask for them in the order she first sees them. On the archive week, 4th or 5th week of the month whatever, label a new tape and use it even if amanda asks for number 14. Then mark that tape (amadmin) as a "no-reuse" so it does not ask for the tape the next time around but the index for the tape will remain available. With a little creative regular expression you could make your config recognize tapes with different labels for the rotation and for the archive. For example you might have your config use a label like Backup-[A]*[0-9][0-9]*. Then you could have Backup-1 to Backup-17 in regular roation and monthly create a Backup-A1, Backup-A2 ... for the archive. -- Jon H. LaBadie [EMAIL PROTECTED] JG Computing 4455 Province Line Road (609) 252-0159 Princeton, NJ 08540-4322 (609) 683-7220 (fax)
