How does Amanda decide what it's going to do, dump-level wise. From the POV of ease of restoration, level 0 every day is the easiest way to go. From the POV of minimising tape usage, bumping the dump level every day is the way to go.
Between these two extremes, depending on your tape capacity and the capacity of the disks in your disklist, is the optimum strategy for amanda. I know that amanda tries to make sure that each disk in the disklist has as level 0 dump at least once in the cycle, and also that it will bump a dump of a disk to a higher level when it can save X MB (a configurable amount based on the bumpXXXX variables), and also that it sometimes promotes a level 0 dump to earlier in the cycle when it has space. But exactly how does it decide this ? It would seem to me that amanda should use the tape as much as it can and promote as many dumps as necessary to do that but it doesn't seem to do so from what I've seen. Is there a minimum number of runs before amanda will repeat a level 0 for a disk ? Kindest regards, Niall O Broin
