Special:Badtitle/NS100:What is the difference between "skip-full" and "strategy nofull"?
This article answers a FAQ (frequently asked question).
"strategy nofull" is supposed to handle the following situation: you run a full dump off-line once a millenium :-), because that disk isn't supposed to change at all and, if it does, changes are minimal. Amanda will run only level 1 backups of that filesystem, to avoid the risk of overwriting a level 1 backup needed to do a restore. Remember, you run full dumps once a millenium, and your tape cycle probably won't last that long :-)
"skip-full", OTOH, is supposed to let the user run full dumps off-line regularly (i.e., as often as specified in the dumpcycle), while Amanda takes care of the incrementals. Currently, Amanda will tell you when you're supposed to run the level 0 backups but, if you fail to do so, Amanda will not only skip a full day's worth of valuable backups of the filesystem, on the day it told you to the full backup manually, but it will also run a level 1 backup on the next day, even if you have not performed the full backup yet. Worse yet: it might perform a level 2 on the next day, just after you have run the level 0, so, if the disk should crash, you'd have to restore a level 0 then a level 2, but not the level 1! Not a real problem, but definitely strange, eh?