->>In response to your message<<-
  --received from Jon LaBadie--
>
> On Thu, Oct 23, 2003 at 09:06:36PM -0700, Paul Yeatman wrote:
> > 
> > Thanks for the reply.  Is there any such setting then that would
> > perform what I was once was lead to believe chunksize could control,
> > ie. specifying a file size over which a backup file should be written
> > directly to tape, bypassing the holding disk?
> > 
> 
> I'm pretty sure the size of the holding disk already does this.
> 
> If the estimated size of the backup is larger than the holding disk
> space it is taped directly.  For this determination I believe the
> space available has already been reduced by the percentage specified
> by the "reserve" parameter in amanda.conf and by the amount of
> space the other currently running dumps will take.
> 
> BTW the "negative number" you thought applied to chunksize might have
> been the holding disk size.  A positive number means use up to the
> specified amount of space while a negative number means use all the
> space on the disk except the specified amount.
> 


I'm using amanda 2.4.2p2 and from much emperical data, whenever the
laptop backup size being attempted is greater than the the amount of
holding disk space, the entire job is put on hold until the specified
delay time.  At that point, if all the unbacked up laptop entries are
still online, the amanda job will continue without a problem but this
is rarely the case!  This means that, if I have 9 laptop entries in my
disklist, and the third one attempting to be backed up doesn't have
sufficient holding disk space, the backup will stop at the end of the
second entry waiting until the specified delay starttime.  The manual
pages maybe don't indicate this behavoir but, given a few years of use
now, I've seen this over and over.

I agree, Frank, that if the holding disk space were IDE, it wouldn't be
a great cost to simply increase the size of this.  Unfortunately, at
the time, I'm dealing with a Sun AMANDA server which ='s scsi which ='s
nontrivial costs.  My whole setup could be completely reconsidered
(moving the server possibly to a linux box with a scsi card for the
tape drive) but for the moment I'm simply trying to make due with the
server and disk space I already have.

Thanks everyone,

Paul

-- 
Paul Yeatman       (858) 534-9896        pyeatman AT ucsd DOT edu
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