SNIP--

> But that is exactly what your suggestion does.  In my semi-hypothetical
> situation, amanda would place greater importance on the last full dump
> of retreivable data compared to the first and only backup of yesterdays
> purchase orders that are taped directly.
>
> There is no recourse for yesterdays backups that never occured if needed.
> There are ways to avoid the situation you encountered, sufficient tapes,
> monitoring of reports, and tape spanning.
>
SNIP --

Reports never indicated a problem (see previous emails), tape spanning
isn't an option for a single drive with backup running middle of the
night.

The sufficient tape argument, at first sounds reasonable, but I'm not sure
if it would have helped. This could still have occured (less likely yes),
and the tapes I've got in the cycle at the minute seem to be sufficient.
It just seems to be co-incidence that the only tape with a full backup on
was due for overwriting with a new one from the same machine. If I
configured amanda to do more full backups per dump cycle, this could still
have happened with the _latest_ full backup being overwritten, making all
the incrementals based on this useless.

The difference between the situations you describe, is a backup was
destroyed, and one never occured in the first place. Again, Amanda can't
know which is more important (or can it?).
I could argue that the finance reports were on the overwritten tape.

The difference being that something was destroyed by Amanda, as opposed to
not backed up.
Amanda should do the best it can, and try to get the backup somewhere, or
in worst case, not destroy an existing backup.

I'm still of the opinion that the software should do no damage to last
existing backups.

Obviously a debated point.