I'd prefer to use tar to perform backups, primarilly for portability of restores. However, amanda is running as user 'backup' which doesn't seem to have read permissions in many places.
The client amandad executes libexec/runtar which execs gnutar to overcome this: the program "runtar" should be suid-root (as should be other progs in libexec).
Maybe you lost the suid-bits, or you didn't do "make install" as root?
-- Paul @ Home
