Frank Smith wrote:

If you have plenty of holding disk space and no changer you might prefer to not use chg-manual and lie about your tape length. I'm sure

someone will correct me if I'm wrong (I don't use chg-manual), but I

 :-)

Never lie to amanda. She hates it.
I use chg-multi (two drives) and tell manda that she can use 3 tapes
(runtapes 3).  With these parameters Amanda writes two tapes at night,
and dumps the rest to holdingdisk, which I flush manually on monday
morning on the third tape. (This works also for one drive.)
Note: you have to set the reserve parameter to something else than
the default 100 (= reserve 100% of the holdingdisk for incrementals
when dumping in degraded mode because you ran out of tape)
for this work.

think with chg-manual and a small holdingdisk Amanda pauses the
backups while it waits for a new tape. If you run it overnight and
don't change tapes until the morning, part of your backups will be
run after you change the tape, and you may not want the load on your
servers and network during the day (plus your filesystems may be more
active). If you say your tape is much longer than it is, Amanda will
hit EOT and continue doing the backups to holdingdisk. You can then
run amflush the next morning after changing tapes without impacting
any other servers.

If you lie to Amanda, she might as well think that some DLE would fit
on this exagerated tape, but which physically does not fit on the real
tape length.  Also the newer parameter like 'taperalgo largestfit'
would not work.