You already got some good answers from John, Joshua and Gene. I'll just fill in a couple of details.
> What happens if I lie to amanda and set the length to 40000mbytes? Then planner will assume it has that much space (multiplied by runtapes, if you have a changer) and treat it as an upper bound. In general, it's not a good idea to lie to Amanda :-). However, in the case of hardware compression (which I use because software compression would push my backup time to well over 24 hours), you have to trick it with a guess at what will actually fit. One way to do that is to set it pretty high and let Amanda fail a few times. On every run you'll get a line from taper like this: taper: tape 041383/lookout kb 131008352 fm 62 writing file: short write That tells you how much data actually was written before an error was detected. After a few runs, take those numbers and come up with a new value for the length. > If it reaches the end of the tape, it will reprogram the failed > filesystems for the next tape, right? Not sure exactly what you mean here. If you have runtapes > 1 and Amanda hits end of tape (or any tape error), it will advance to the next tape and start that image over again. If it runs out of tapes (either because runtapes == 1 or you use up runtapes tapes), the rest of the images will be left in the holding disk (assuming they fit). >Perhaps this is why now amanda is skipping some large filesystems ... We'd have to see the exact message to know why it's skipping. >Could it be that amanda is not even attempting to write to tape >because of what the tapetype entry says about the length? Yup. If Amanda ends up with, say, 100 GBytes of estimated dumps to fit on a 40 GByte tape, it has to start backing off things. There are several things it will try, but at the end of the list is "oh, well, maybe tomorrow will be better" :-). >Fernan John R. Jackson, Technical Software Specialist, [EMAIL PROTECTED]
