[Nottingham] Amanda Tape Backup

[Richard Bagshaw]

Morning Guys,

Bit of a novice when it comes to Amanda tape backup systems, but I have
chosen this path and so far im happy with it -- the system I have at the
moment is a Centos server with an internal scsi LTO-2 tape drive with 10
tapes @ 200/400gb each.  I have everything working correctly and each night
it will run the crontab and perform its backup.  My slight confusion comes
with the whole dumpcycle, tapecycle, runspercycle and runstape thing ...

Firstly, as I understand it the definitions for these terms are as follows
:-

dumpcycle (currently 2 weeks) = the length of time that it takes to complete
a full set of backups, after this amount of time we start putting in tape 1
again etc to be overwritten
tapecycle (currently 10)  = the number of tapes available
runspercycle (currently 9) = how many backups to perform (full and/or
differential) during the dumpcycle, so if the dumpcycle was 2 weeks and the
runspercycle was 9 then it would do 9 backups in the two week period?
runtapes (currently 1) = how many tapes each backup task should use, in my
case - no autoloader, so this is 1

What I would ideally like is to have two sets, both using 5 tapes, so ...

Week 1 : TapeSet01
Week 2 : TapeSet02
Week 3 : TapeSet01
Week 4 : TapeSet02

The reason I want todo this is because I want to be able to take offsite
backups, and since amanda manages the whole schedule of when it does a full
backup it kinda makes it impossible to know when to take a single tape
offsite, so im thinking at the end of each week just take away one set, or
is there another better way to deal with offsite backups ?

Anyone had any experience with amanda and this kind of setup im trying to
acheive?  I know 10 tapes is an odd low number, but thats budgets I guess
... :/

Thanks again...

-- 

Regards,

Richard Bagshaw
richard at bagshaw.co.uk
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