can Amanda append to a tape that's not full?

[Les Mikesell]

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 at 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 at gmail.com