On Wed, May 18, 2005 at 09:47:29PM +0200, Paul Bijnens wrote:
> Eric Dantan Rzewnicki wrote:
> >Is it normal for some dumps to go directly to tape, skipping the holding
> >disk?
> >
> >I see that happening sometimes, but wonder if it means I have something
> >misconfigured.
> 
> 
> Those DLE's with an estimated size larger than the configured value
> for holdingdisk will bypass holdingdisk an dump directly to tape.

Also, there's a bug in current versions of gnu tar that cause it to
produce extremely large estimates if the filesystem contains sparse
files.  On Fedora Core x86_64 machines, attempting to back up /var can
be a challenge because tar thinks /var/log/lastlog is a terabyte or
two in size and produces estimates that are somewhat larger than my
50G tape.  See the commentery in
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=154882

The usual symptom of this bug is Amanda refusing to dump the DLE at
all, but I can imagine it forcing a dump to go direct-to-tape instead
of to the holding disk under some circumstances.

> I noticed that the example amanda.conf file has specified "use 290 m"
> for the holdingdisk section.
> Many people seem to forget to adapt that arbitrary number there.

Maybe we should change it to "use 1t"?  That'll get people to notice
it, won't it? :-)

                        -- JF