1. If I have a 16 tape tapecycle, and a dumpcycle of 7, does this mean I effectively have 16 days of backups? As in, I can do a restore of up to 16 days? (I'm just trying to wrap my head around this new-to-me backup method.)
No, probably only 16 - 7 days = 9 days (if you have runspersycle = 7) or 16 - 5 = 11 days (if you have runspercycle = 5). The tapes (number=runspercyle, missing from your mail) from the last dumpcycle days (7 in your case) contain at least one level 0 backup of each filesystem. You can only go back to the last level 0. Some filesystems can go back 16 days, most of them do not.
If you're very lucky, you find your file in an incremental backup before the last level 0, but don't count on it.
2. If I disable hardware compression and use software compression, how would that affect my tapetype definition?
define tapetype DLT8000 { comment "Quantaum (IBM) DLT-8000" length 37482 mbytes filemark 2362 kbytes speed 5482 kps }
Yes. If you rely on hardware compression and do NOT use software compression that 37 Gbyte is probably way too low; it's probably closer to 40 GByte. If you use HW compression you have to take a wild guess of your tapelength, depending on on much your data compresses; setting it here to less than the native tapecapacity is meaningless (or you shouldn't be using hardware compression at all). The above tapetype was probably produced with hardware compression on, and is giving wrong values -- amtapetype from amanda 2.4.4 detects this.
(I got that off the list.)
3. Does anyone running Debian Woody use xfsdump? I'm having trouble getting that to work without having to recompile (not ideal) so I'm testing with tar right now. (I get the "disk not available?" error when I softlink /sbin/dump to /sbin/xfsdump.) Wouldn't native dump be the ideal method?
I've no experience with xfsdump. Are the permissions of /sbin/xfsdump correct? Is /../libexec/rundump suid root and owned by root?
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