David Olbersen wrote:

Why not have your database program dump to a backup directory before amanda 
comes in? If you've got the disk space this makes the most sense.

One thing to do though: if you're going to keep history, don't name your 
backups dbdump.1,  dbdump.2, dbdump.3, etc. When you rotate them out the 
timestamp on ALL of them change, so amanda has to tape all of them again. Using 
a slightly smarter system do produce dbdump.20040101, dbdump.20040102, 
dbdump.20040103, etc. makes things better.

$.02,

-Ken