On Mon, 19 Jul 2004 at 5:19pm, Kris Vassallo wrote

> 420GB is not the total amount per night. Something is bogging this down
> though and I don't know what. I am not using holding disks because the
> majority of data is being backed up from one set of disks to another on
> the same machine. This one machine has a set of RAID 10 disks. These
> disks are backed up by amanda and put onto a set of RAID 5 disks. As far

Just as an aside, having your backup disks on the same controller as your 
real data seems a bit risky to me -- what if the controller goes?  What if 
it takes multiple disks with it?

> as assigning spindle #s goes I don't quite understand why I would set
> that. I have inparallel set to 4  and then didn't define maxdumps, so I
> would assume that not more than 1 dumper would get started on a machine
> at once. Am I getting this right?  Here is my email log from the backup

That's correct.  maxdumps (dumps per host at a time) defaults to 1.  
inparallel controls total number of backups at once.

>                           Total       Full      Daily
>                         --------   --------   --------
> Estimate Time (hrs:min)    7:30

As Frank pointed out, this is a big part of your problem.  What OS and FS 
are we talking here, and what backup program?  And, again, sendsize*debug 
will tell you which DLEs are taking so long to estimate.