Dumps way too big, must skip incremental dumps

--- This text was originally contributed to the AMANDA-FAQ-O-Matic by [email protected]. ---

It means Amanda couldn't back up some disk because it wouldn't fit in the tape(s) you have configured Amanda to use. It considered performing some incrementals instead of full dumps, so that all disks would fit, but this wouldn't be enough, so the disk really had to be dropped in this run.

In general, you can just ignore this message if it happens only once in a while. Low-priority disks are discarded first, so you'll hardly miss really important data.

One real work-around is to configure Amanda to use more tapes: increase `runtapes' in `amanda.conf'. Even if you don't have a real tape changer, you can act yourself as a changer (`chg-manual'; more details in the question about tape changer configuration), or use `chg-multi' with a single tape unit, and lie to Amanda that it will have two tapes to use. If you have a holding disk as large as a tape, and configure Amanda (2.4.1b1 or newer) not to reserve any space for degraded dumps, dumps that would be stored in the second tape of a run will be performed to the holding disk, so you can flush them to tape in the morning.