Eric,

I think Jon LaBadie hit it when he suggested that amanda wasn't
examining the threshold as "data to tape" rather than "data to dump"
and the change from SW to HW compression was bringing us over this
limit.

Since this is Lotus Notes and the "databases" are little more than
large text files, any change, delivery of a single piece of mail
to a mutli-gigabye user mail "database" will result in the whole
database being put to tape, regardless of dump level.

So the dump levels pretty much back up the same amount of data
every night, no matter how quickly or slowly we increment the
dump level. Only the relatively few files that are untouched are
not sent to tape.

There is a word that I like to use for this type of design. "Hidious"

I'm been asked to keep the dump levels from incrementing (so quickly)
even though it doesn't matter much, because the changes are misleading
and potentially confusing come time to restore.

Its broke, just not the amanda part. Gee, that is twice this week
that I've been able to proclaim that to the amanda users list.

> 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...

Nope, no operations staff, dumpcycle 1 week, runs/cycle 5.

What I was thinking with the disk granularity was that perhaps the
files/databases where themselves larger because of over allocation
more unused space within each file.

er, vocabulary... RA81 cluster size default was 3 blocks, on close
of a sequential file space was EOF placed apropriately and the additional
space typically freed up. On the, I don't know, pick a new/large spindle
the default/min cluster size moved to 5 blocks. So a one block file would
have a min size of 5 rather than 3 blocks.

I guess there aren't enough files to make a difference in this case 
since there are few databases but they are relatively large.

It too is a non-issue.

                                                thank you,

                                                Brian
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   Brian R Cuttler                 brian.cuttler AT wadsworth DOT org
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