Dear all,

We have lots of data in a folder called /usr/local/clients, with a
subfolder for each client.  Up to now I've been able to let amanda do a
full backup every night, but now we're getting close to exceeding
acceptable time and tape capacity limits.

Once a month I take one tape out of amanda's set of tapes as a monthly
long-term archive.

What I want to do now is continue doing full backups every night, but
exclude any data that will have been backed up to the monthly archive
tape.

What suggestions would you have in terms of the best way to achieve
this?  Ask nicely that people tar up older data with an agreed-upon
filename, such as client_name_archived.tar.gz, and then exclude
*_archived.tar.gz?  Have a script that automatically modifies the
exclude file on the amanda client with a massive list of files that
haven't been modified during the past month?

I'd appreciate any advice on this.  I guess the main concern would be to
know on what monthly archive tape to find whatever data I need to
restore, should this become necessary.

Thanks.