On Sun, 2005-12-18 at 16:30, Matt Morgan wrote: > 1) is there a way to tell Amanda to wait to flush from the holding > disks until there's enough to be worth writing to the tape? Or is the > only way to do this to manually keep the tape out of the drive until a > certain day? > > The problem I see with this is, how do you know what day to put it in > so that you are sure to get a full backup on each tape? I realize you > can set dumpcycle to seven days, and runsprecycle to one; even so, > that doesn't mean Amanda does exactly one full backup every seven > days, correct? If you are running to tape normally, you'll get at least one full backup of each filesystem within a dumpcycle but if there is sufficient space on the tape, amanda may promote additional runs to fulls. This is a good thing since it reduces the steps you'd have to do to restore those days. I don't think the promotions happen when the tape is not available, so a dumpcycle should be exactly right. You do have to set the 'reserved' percentage low to allow the full runs to happen when in degraded (not tape) mode. > 2) What is the smart way to give the amanda user read access to all > the files on disk so they can be backed up? It looks like the FC4 > packages started this job, by making amanda's group = "disk," but that > doesn't seem to help, really: > > [root@matt ~]# su - amanda > -bash-3.00$ cd /home/matt > -bash: cd: /home/matt: Permission denied If you are using dump, having read access to the disk partitions is enough. For tar it uses /usr/lib/amanda/runtar to let it run as root. -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell@xxxxxxxxx