On Fri, Jan 21, 2005 at 11:30:02AM -0500, Brian Cuttler wrote:
> 4) We did also change the crontab for bin to force level 0 dumps on
>    Fridays. This change reflecting the changes made when we renamed
>    "notes_dlt" to "wcnotes".

Are you perchance seeing these level-2 dumps disproportionally
often on Sunday nights? :-)  Maybe people just don't use Notes
much on weekends, and now that the level-0's are synched to the
work week...

> [...] we are not losing any
> data nor do I believe that a file restore (of individual files) would
> be any more difficult than previous. A full restore would of course
> entail restores from each dump level.

Agreed on all points.  As you said, it's a non-problem.

>      Could we be seeing more change in the file system than previously
>      because of changes to the disk cluster-size ? ie, the granularity
>      in the number of blocks/sectors on the Raid vs the older single
>      spindle disk drives ?

I'd expect to see more level-bumping as the amount of changed
data *decreases*.

But either way, it's hard to imagine how changing the cluster
size would have any effect that's visible up at the file level.
It'd affect the amount of wasted space at the ends of files, but
tar doesn't back up that wasted space, and I rather doubt that
dump does either, so Amanda shouldn't even notice the change.

>      We could increase both the bumpdays and bumpsize values

If it ain't broke, don't fix it!

>      We could even force level 0 every day if desired [...]

See above :-)  There might well be legitimate reasons to do this,
but the current situation isn't one of them.

Another possibility that hasn't been raised: has Notes's
behaviour changed in some way, to make it modify fewer files?
Could be fewer writes overall, or more creating of new files as
opposed to modifying of old ones (which would make the old files
in question contribute to the bumpable side of the ledger,
instead of to the unbumpable side as before).  Maybe it's a
year-end rollover, i.e. Notes is now writing a new, still-small
foo.2005, and the huge foo.2004 is now static.

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics AT telepres DOT com
|  |  /
The animal that coils in a circle is the serpent; that's why so
many cults and myths of the serpent exist, because it's hard to
represent the return of the sun by the coiling of a hippopotamus.
        - Umberto Eco, "Foucault's Pendulum"