This one time, at band camp, Frank Smith wrote:
>--On Tuesday, February 15, 2005 17:44:32 +1100 Jamie Wilkinson <jaq AT 
>spacepants DOT org> wrote:
>
>> We've got one problem machine that has about 90GB in one DLE, and our tapes
>> are 100GB LTO1s.
>> 
>> Of course, once a cycle, the server decides it can only write maybe 5 DLES
>> out of 150+ to the tape, because one of them is 80GB+, and so all the other
>> dumps end up being reported as
>> 
>>   FAILED [dumps way too big, 1 KB, must skip incremental dumps]
>> 
>> which afaict means that amanda doesn't even attempt to back up this DLE
>> because it knows it's not going to fit it on the tape.
>> 
>> But I've got a ton of free space in the holding disk.  What I want to know
>> is, is there an option to tell the server to do the dumps anyway and hold
>> them, so later I can come along with another tape and flush them?
>
>If you have plenty of holdingdisk space, I would think they would go there.
>Even with the default reserve of 100%, you should still get the incremental.
>You might have to look in the debug files to see why they were completely
>skipped.

Well, I did check, and there were no incrementals in the holding disk.
According to the debug log, the planner fails the dumps right after building
the schedule.

>> In general, we only need one LTO1 a day, this particular DLE is a freak
>> statistic well outside the standard deviations of the other DLE sizes, so
>> doing a flush once every cycle is more appealing than allocating two tapes
>> per run.
>
>Just because you set runtapes > 1 doesn't mean Amanda will use them all.
>I keep runtapes set to a number higher than what normally gets used per
>run, and have autoflush set true.  That way even if I have a tape error
>and it all goes to disk, the next run can flush it all and do the backups
>as well without running out of tape.
>  If you normally only need one tape, then that's what it will normally
>use, even if you have runtapes set to 2 or 3 or whatever.  The higher
>number just allows it to use additional tape(s) if needed.

I was under the impression that Amanda would choose dump levels to fill as
much of the tapes as possible.  That's incorrect then?