On Thu, Mar 01, 2007 at 12:53:43PM -0500, Alastair Neil enlightened us:
> My experience with amanda in the past is that it will not write level 0
> dumps only to holding space - is this incorrect?  If this is the case then
> indeed my configuration is overly complicated.  I have in the past
> maintained a 9 months backup history - that would be about 270 tapes - a lot
> of LTO2 media.  I didn't mention but we are an academic environment so this
> starts to become cost prohibitive, as it is I was looking at only providing
> a semester ~ 3month backup window going forward.
>

It most certainly does store level 0's to holding disk. I also am
educational and have an LTO2 setup. My weekly backups are currently about
150GB, so I let them spool on a RAID1 holding disk for a week, then put a
tape in and let them autoflush on the 7th day. I have a rotating set of
tapes for 20 weeks, and do an archival dump quarterly.

You probably just need to adjust your reserve parameter properly in
amanda.conf. The default is 100% is reserved for degraded-mode backups. Set
it to something smaller to allow fulls to fit.

Matt