Something occured to me earlier today, this seemed the place to ask.

Amanda is unable to have the dump of a single DLE span tapes.

I've seen that amanda will 'chunk' (per chunksize amanda.conf param)
the output of a DLE in the spool area.

Does it also have the ability to write different chunks to different
spool areas if more than a single spool is defined ?

Would it be possible to write the different chunks to tape and
assemble them on recovery if needed ? That is, only in the case
where the completely reassembled DLE dump will not fit on the
remaining space of the tape volume.

My thoughts are that
   1) it doesn't make sense to write chunks to tape until the DLE
      is completely written to spool, there is no value in saving
      a partial DLE to tape, you need the whole thing to recover.

   2) If you can fit the entire DLE to tape in one piece, as is
      done now amrecover -p | restore works wonderfully.

   3) Recovery occurs a lot less often than dumping, at least at
      my site. If I have to periodically restore/reassemble multiple
      chunks from more than one tape to spool before extracting the
      lost files from the DLE the additional step will likely be
      worth the added flexability.

Of course I say all that without specing out the modified amtape,
amrestore, or new amreassembly.

Just a though. There is already a way to chunk the output, maybe
it can be taken advantage of.

Maybe enough chunks could to put together to fill the tape volume
and the remaining put on the next tape.

I'm sorry if the discussion already happened (probably on the
developer's list which I don't read).