On Wednesday 27 September 2006 09:06, Jeff Portwine wrote: >Hi everybody, > >Hoping somebody can clarify something about amanda for me. > >I have my backups set to run on a 3 day dump cycle with 6 tapes, running > every evening except sunday night. It seems to work fine, we change > the tape each morning so over the course of a week (if I understand how > amanda works right) we get two sets of full backups. Sometimes we > forget to change a tape, and most Saturdays we don't have anybody here > to change the tape so on those days I thought that Amanda just backed up > to the holding disk and then the next morning we could just change the > tape, do an amflush, then change the tape again so that it would be > ready for the next night. > >However, I've noticed that every time Amanda doesn't find a writeable > tape (usually due to the tape not being changed that day) there is very > little data written to the holding disk and the amflush is very very > small. The day after this, the dump is much larger than usual > compensating for this. When we change the tapes every day, each tape > is usually around 50% full. On a day when we forget to change the > tape or are unable to change the tape the amflush results in about 0.5% > tape useage, and the day following the day we did the amflush tape > useage is usually 85-90%. Is this how it's supposed to behave? > How can I fix it to do a normal dump to the holding disk on days when > either we can't change the tape or we forget to change the tape? > >Thanks for any explanation and/or tips. > >-Jeff
Look up the keyword "reserved" as its used in amanda.conf, the default if not specified there is 100%. And the holding disk must, for this to work correctly, be larger than the tape. I believe some combination of the above is silently effecting your backups. I try to hold about 150% of a tapes size for holding space, with a reserve of 30% IIRC. -- Cheers, Gene "There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order." -Ed Howdershelt (Author) Yahoo.com and AOL/TW attorneys please note, additions to the above message by Gene Heskett are: Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.