On Mon, Aug 22, 2005 at 12:53:19PM -0400, Jason 'XenoPhage' Frisvold wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
>    I've relatively new to Amanda, and playing with backups in general.  
> I've been able to get Amanda to back up my entire server farm (important 
> bits only, no full OS backups), but I'm running into a problem..  Well, 
> possibly a problem.  I get this in my Amanda report :
> 
> FAILURE AND STRANGE DUMP SUMMARY:
>  mail1      /etc lev 1 STRANGE
> 
> 
> I understand, basically, what that means.  In essence, the files are 
> changing and/or being removed before the tar command finishes.  So, what 
> is the proper way to deal with this?  Is this something to be concerned 
> with?

Assuming that was the "strangeness", the specific files should be listed
elsewhere in the report.  Monitor them for a while.  You may find they
are spool files and other temporary files.  If so, who cares.  But also,
why are you backing up the directory containing tmp and spool files :)
Perhaps the exclude directive could help for file types (eg. *.tmp) or
for some directories.

If you find some important files are changing during backup, then you will
have to see if it happens during a lot of backups or just occasionally.
Based on that decide if you can live with it of need to deal with it
in some more complex way.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
 4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
 Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)