Hi, all.  I recently set up Amanda to do backup-to-disk; IDE drives are
just getting too darn cheap for me to ignore any more.  Anyway, all works
fine... so long as compression is totally disabled ("compress none"). 
Otherwise, I get all sorts of errors... damn!  Unfortunately, my log just
got wiped during a reboot.  Going from memory, here are the "symptoms:"

1) For small backups (eg., I back up /etc/ seperately), I can restore no
problem.
2) For larger backups, I am told -- after initially failing to find the
file -- that it's skipping ahead.  Amanda then complains that the data
compression isn't recognized.

I've tried both server- and client-side compression, with identical
results.  I also tried extracting from the command line, using the
following commands (one directly from the file's header, the other changed
subtly to see if there was a difference):

dd if=filename.tar bs=32k skip=1 | gzip -cd | tar xvf -
dd if=filename.tar bs=32k skip=1 | tar zxvf -

I've also tried setting file-pad to "false", just in case it had some
affect; since I wasn't actually storing to honest-to-goodness tape, I
thought maybe the blocksizes were doing something weird, but the results
were identical.

Any suggestions?  Right now, I'm doing my backups w/o compression, and
it's working fine, but I'd really like to be able to make my media go the
extra distance that compression would allow.

Thanks,

Ken D'Ambrosio
Sr. SysAdmin,
Xanoptix, Inc.