Dege, Robert C. wrote:

System:
RedHat 7.1, kernel 2.4.19
amanda 2.4.2p2, samba 2.2.6

I've been backing up several Windows machines for a while now (months).
Recently, I've been getting cramped with tape space, so I added
"compress-client-best" to my samba-pc dump type.

In my experience the compress best uses 4 times as much CPU for only
5% better compression, so it's not worth it, unless you have spare CPU
cycles to burn.  Maybe it's better to increase the dumpcycle (maybe
add more tapes to the tapecycle too), at the cost of having higher
incrementals.  Unless you have already a dumpcycle that's very long...
(Many people run with a dumpcycle of 2 weeks, some even more.)

If you don't have a changer, but you do have large enough holdingdisk,
one of the options is also to set "runtapes 2" and "reserve 0", and
let the dumps go to one tape, and overflow on holdingdisk, which you
flush each morning manually.

However, while watching amanda perform the dump, it seems as if the linux
server is compressing the data, and not the windows client.  The more I
think about it, the more it makes sense, since amanda treats the smbclient
connection as an ftp connection rather than an amanda client machine.  So
the amanda server itself is the client, and the server in one for the samba
backups (right?)

Right.  If you think a litter more about this, the amanda server does
not need to be the computer that runs smbclient.  My amandaserver has
already his cpu fully loaded, and two other machines do the smbclient
backups for my window machines, and they do the compression too.

But, my amanda server is slow.  So the PC stays connected while the dumper
compresses the dumped files.  Would the dumper relinquish the machine faster
if I used compress-svr-fast vs. compress-client-fast?

Execute "compress" on the machine that has the free CPU cycles, be it
your amanda server, be it one or more other machines.

messages on this list indicate cygwin+amanda+compression has some
problems, yet to be solved).

--
Paul @ Home