Jack Baty wrote:

I've added a couple of DLEs to the configuration this morning. I'd like to try running amdump "early" instead of waiting for the nightly cron job to run it so that if it works I can add a few more DLEs sooner. Is it a bad idea to run amdump manually before it's "supposed" to run? What effect would this have on the tapecycle/dumpcycle/runspercycle?

In my test setup, I do many "runs" sometimes even with minutes
in between, and I've never seen something strange because of this.
Amanda just asks the next tape, switches level, just as I would expect.

But now that you're asking it explicitly, I know that amanda does
its bookkeeping in date and not in date-time format.  I wonder what
breaks???
One thing comes to mind: for amrecover, you cannot specify through the

a few hours after the other one. These problems are not critical,
as far as I can see (e.g. use amrestore instead.)
Anybody something else?

Also, I'm not here to change tapes on weekends, so I've got cron running nightly Monday-Friday and amanda.conf has..

dumpcycle 2 weeks
runspercycle 10
tapecycle 20

That seems right, but it's a little confusing (too much Googling can be a bad thing :)

It is right indeed.  Are you sure you need a dumpcycle of 2 weeks?
Does it not fit in 1 week (with runspercycle 5)?

Oh, one more thing...

The default amanda.conf file (Amanda 2.4.4) uses the following dumptype format...

define dumptype user-tar {
    program "GNUTAR"
    comment "Partitions dumped with tar"
    options no-compress, index, exclude-list "/etc/amanda/exclude.gtar"
}

If you put it like that, that's not the correct syntax.
Doesn't amcheck complain?  Did I miss something in the manual?

The above should be written as:

  define dumptype user-tar {
     program "GNUTAR"
     comment "Partitions dumped with tar"
     compress none
     index yes
     exclude list "/etc/amanda/exclude.gtar"
  }
        

Will indexing be enabled in that case? In my case, I'm getting the "no index records." error when running amrecover. Most of the examples use "index yes" instead. Which is it?

"index no" is the default if omitted.  So you need "index yes" in
your dumptype (and indexes will exist from the next run on, they are
not magically created for all existing backups).

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