Jon LaBadie wrote:

With such a structured, non-amanda-like requirement,
what benefits do you feel you would experience from
using amanda?  It will not be doing the scheduling,
you will.  It will not specify the tapes to be used,
you will.  It will track the backups (what is on what
tape from what date), but you would know that already.

What are you looking for amanda to do for you that
you could not do with cron entries and shell scripts?

I chose amanda, because I needed to do backups in a
heterogenous *nix machine network. The other requirements
are not of my own design. I would have been happy with
whatever scheme Amanda would have suggested.

The people I'm working for use Backup Exec, and a specific
rigid schedule for their Windows machines. I'm not going to
argue with them (it's not worth it, I'll rather quit).

(Sorry for venting my frustration; I seem to have needed that).