Marcus <ashogunnamedmarcus AT yahoo DOT com> writes:

> In amanda.conf it says 
> "If a dump is too big to fit on the holding disk than
> it will be written directly to tape."
> 
> I'm hoping to write 200g at a time to DLT, and would
> like to stream it if possible. Does that mean I need
> 200g of holding disk? I scrounged up 20g, but another
> 180g doesn't look likely.

As others pointed out, it's about the max size of single dump.
My experience (with DDS - which is less reliable than DLT, and is
really unreliable if not streamed) is that I want holding disk on the
order of twice the tape, so that I can run backups without tape and
then flush if the tape isn't changed.   If you are backing up a single
200G partition, maybe it's ok not to use a holding disk - if the DLT
is happy with start/stop.  But if you have 10 20G partitions, with a
100G or so holding disk you'd be able to do 5 in parallel and then
stream them, making the backups run much faster.


-- 
        Greg Troxel <gdt AT ir.bbn DOT com>