Dumps too big, but cannot incremental dump new disk

From The Open Source Backup Wiki (Amanda, MySQL Backup, BackupPC)
Jump to navigationJump to search

This article is a part of the Troubleshooting collection.

Problem

Your amreport says something like:

FAILURE AND STRANGE DUMP SUMMARY:
 host      /path  lev 0  FAILED [dumps too big, 235290 KB, but cannot incremental dump new disk]

Explanation

This often occurs when an Amanda configuration is first set up. The problem is that Amanda does not have room to do a full dump of all of the DLEs in the configuration on the first day, but cannot to an incremental dump of a DLE it has never seen before. So Amanda doesn't do anything with those DLEs on the first day, but will probably manage to dump them in the next day or two, while running incremental dumps of the other DLEs.

So there is nothing to "fix" here -- if Amanda has enough tape space, it will quickly settle on a backup schedule that does a few fulls each day, with all non-full DLEs getting an incremental dump.

If Amanda does not settle on such a schedule, then you may need to increase your tape space or decrease the size of your DLEs.