Christoph wrote:

2.) the main reason for the error above:
you are trying to use dump to backup the subdirectory /home/mysql.
Dump is designed to work on complete devices, like /dev/hda1 or so,
it can not do what you ask it for, and exactly that it is telling you.

easy solution:

use tar to dump your directory, add in your amada.conf in the dumptype
for that directory the line

program "GNUTAR"

Thanks everyone.  That in fact was the problem....

At least I got one good backup out of it....

--Yan