Hi,

I'm using AMANDA server 2.4.5p1 on a RH 9 having DLT tapes and vtapes as
well.

All the backup clients are Linux machines using ext3 fs.

I had two particular problem with a client running CentOS and using
tar-1.14 and amanda-client 2.4.5p1.

1: amadmin (and the mail reports as well) reported that /var/spool/mail/p
level 0 dump, was on vtape-7, but for unknown reasons, vtape-7 didn't
contain any data regarding /var/spool/mail/p,  it contained
other data that had no relevance.

I wasn't able to find /var/spool/mail/p level 0 dump, on any of the
vtapes. The backup was inconsistent.

I've checked the history of AMANDA, and /var/spool/mail/p level 0 dump,
was reported to be on vtapes-7, and there wasn't any error during the
backup procedure.

The dump definition looks like this:

dumpcycle 10 day        # the number of days in the normal dump cycle
runspercycle 8  day    # the number of amdump runs in dumpcycle days
tapecycle 12 tapes      # the number of tapes in rotation

Can I still trust AMANDA reports or should I do a manual check?

2: the last level 0 dump of /var/spool/mail/p was on the 24.02, and the
next incremental dump took place on the 27.02, so, though the level 0 dump
of /var/spool/mail/p was missing, the incremental backup of
/var/spool/mail/p should have had included all the new mails between 24.02
- 27.02.

How is is possible for GNUtar to skip files that have a ctime newer than
the last level 0 dump?

Thanks for your support,
Iulian Topliceanu