Jon LaBadie wrote:

Following up to my own reply:

I checked the most recent debug files and they show the "*.new" files
are being used.  For example, corresponding to the last listing above,
two lines from sendbackup...debug:

sendbackup-gnutar: time 0.207: doing level 1 dump as listed-incremental \
  to /var/lib/amanda/gnutar-lists/bigcowUSR_1.new

sendbackup: argument list: gtar --create --file - --directory /usr \
  --one-file-system \
  --listed-incremental /var/lib/amanda/gnutar-lists/bigcowUSR_1.new \
  --sparse --ignore-failed-read --totals \
  --exclude-from /tmp/amanda/sendbackup.USR.20060602043755.exclude .

sendbackup should rename the file (remove  the .new) when the backup finish.
Anything in the log showing why it don't rename it?

That's why you get full dump at every level.

Jean-Louis