This is to thank everyone that responded to the original posting. General
consensus is that you run amchecks late in the afternoon, check e-mail, fix
any problems before you go home.
For amverify, most run this on the weekend or after the last backup of the
week has completed. But a better recommendation is to weekly test a restore
process to really make sure it works.

As for myself, I'll run amcheck in the afternoon and try to remember to
check e-mail before I leave for the day and run amverify on the weekends. As
far as testing a restore, I'll do this on weekends or holidays when I have
other work scheduled. There's this perception by end-users and management
that our systems should be available 24x7x365.

Just a side note - I am now backing up 2 Sun servers and 24 Windows NT/2000
servers. Just after I had Amanda working for a couple of weeks, a WebCt
administrator deleted several online courses from the server in error. Of
course, she had no backup copies. Latest backup from the network group was
almost a week old (best they could do was a weekly backup). I had just
backed up this server the day before. I used gnutar to restore the backup to
disk and then used amrestore to restore the files that were deleted to the
server. The bag of candy kisses from the WebCT admin was greatly
appreciated.

Bob...

> Bob,
>
> I don't run amdump dependent on amcheck output - amdump can fail
> quite well on its own.
<snip>
> > Lately, with the advent of some network viruses, I've had backups not
occur
> > when I run amcheck before running amdump. My script, which is run from
> > crontab, checks to see if amcheck ran successfully before I allow amdump
to
> > run. I'm using samba to back up Windows servers across the network to my
> > Sun server. Is there any good reason to have this type of procedure in
> > place where amcheck must be successful before running amdump?
> >
> > Also, I don't run amverify either because I lack the time during the
backup
> > window for this. I'm not sure this is necessary either. What is amverify
> > really checking? I don't think it checks what was dumped on tape vs what
is
> > on the disk. Is it necessary to make sure  you really have a valid
backup?
> >
> > Bob...