>We tried for months trying to get the tape changer to work but it >never happened. ...
Which "tape changer" didn't work? The physical hardware or something related to Amanda? If Amanda, which changer did you try and how did you configure it? And what version? >Also, is there a way to stop it from estimating? ... Not right now. It's been suggested before but isn't likely to happen any time soon. >We use full backups >(130Gb) every night and the thing spends hours running it's >compression estimations (even though it is turned off) ... Compression has nothing to do with gathering the estimates. Amanda needs to gather estimates so it know whether everything is going to fit on the tapes you have allocated for the run, and if not, which levels to defer until it does (also, what can be promoted). Is Amanda doing more than a level 0 estimate (check the amdump.<nn> file)? If so, how do you have it configured to do full dumps every day? >... it sometimes times out and doesn't back any thing up ... Have you increased etimeout? That's a workaround for your case, but doing backups is better than not doing them :-). >... The simplest method would >be to tell it to use "du -sk" but so far, I haven't had the time. One hack would be to take the gtar-wrapper code from: ftp://gandalf.cc.purdue.edu/pub/amanda/gtar-wrapper.* and have it do "fast" estimates for you. It should not be hard to add to the framework that's there. Have you actually tried a "du -sk" to see if it's any faster? Both it and tar have to traverse the whole directory tree and stat everything. If you're doing whole file systems, "df -k" would be the way to go. Or switch to using dump instead of tar (although you'd have to be comfortable with those ramifications). John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
