Cameron Matheson wrote:

I have one directory on one of my boxes that holds files for customers (each customer gets a subdirectory (the subdirectory seems to just be a customer number... so it's mostly sequential unless a customer gets deleted. The size of these directories varies widely (anywhere from a few megabytes to 15 gigabytes). All in all there is a little under 200GB of data that needs to be backed up. Initially I had just been going through the list of directories myself and compiling 15GB chunks of them to be backed up, but due to the ever-changing nature of these directories it's kind of a pain to keep up w/ that. Is there any way I could have amanda automatically split this directory up into chunks to be backed up? Or, does anyone else have any keen ideas on how one might approach this problem?

Splitting with gnutar include/exclude is one option, but in this
case indeed really difficult.

I think this is a perfect candidate for the new tape-spanning features
of the 2.5.0 release.

Download, compile and install the newest, still beta release.  I use
one from:

  http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/~martinea/amanda/

The 2.5.0 is still in beta, but I'm already using it (for the tape

Create a dumptype for the large disks (you may still use include/exclude
like before to avoid creating a gigantic DLE), like:

  define dumptype comp-user-tar-split {
    user-tar
    compress client fast
    tape_splitsize 1g
    split_diskbuffer "/space/amandahold"
    fallback_splitsize 64m
  }

Have a look at the man page for the last three parameters in:

 http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Amanda.conf#DUMPTYPE_SECTION


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Paul Bijnens, Xplanation                            Tel  +32 16 397.511
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