> No, you misunderstood Gene.  Amanda CANNOT span a large 
> filesystem across multiple tapes.  Can not, no way, no how.

Oh. Bugger.

That is *really* dissappointing. gnu tar has (or at least, appears to
have) options that should enable spanning... eg:

---
    -F, --info-script F --new-volume-script F
              run script at end of each tape (implies -M)
...
    -L, --tape-length N
              change tapes after writing N*1024 bytes
...
    -M, --multi-volume
              create/list/extract multi-volume archive
---

And so does e2fs dump:

---
    -F script
             Run script at the end of each tape. The device name and the
cur-
             rent volume number are passed on the command line.  The
script
             must return 0 if dump should continue without asking the
user to
             change the tape, 1 if dump should continue but ask the user
to
             change the tape.  Any other exit code will cause dump to
abort.
             For security reasons, dump reverts back to the real user ID
and
             the real group ID before running the script.
...
     -M      Enable the multi-volume feature. The name specified with -f
is
             treated as a prefix and dump writes in sequence to
<prefix>001,
             <prefix>002 etc. This can be useful when dumping to files
on an
             ext2 partition, in order to bypass the 2GB file size
limitation.
---

Could someone explain to me (or refer me to a URL that explains) why
Amanda can't use these features to enable multi-tape dumping? Is there
some neccessary reason why it's impossible, or is it merely a desired
feature that hasn't been implemented yet?

My problem is that I (am planning to) have a single filesystem, which
will be around 300Gb in size, but I have a choice between DLT4000 and
DLT7000 tapes, at 40 or 70Gb each. I guess I can do the work-around that
Jon LaBadie mentioned later in the email I quoted above, but I'd rather
not, if I can avoid it. If I have no choice, then rather than explicitly
listing X different DLEs, I'd rather be able to say /BIG/*, and have
amanda figure out how best to order them. Is that possible?

Cheers

rr

-- 
Richard Russell
Yellow Goanna P/L
m: +61 412 827 805
e: richard AT yellowgoanna DOT com
w: http://www.yellowgoanna.com