Dumps way too big, must skip incremental dumps

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This article is a part of the Troubleshooting collection.

Problem

amdump shows the following error for a DLE:

dumps way too big, must skip incremental dumps

Explanation

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 even this wouldn't save enough space, so the disk really had to be dropped in this run.

Solution

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 workaround is to configure Amanda to use more tapes: increase runtapes in amanda.conf(5). Even if you don't have a real tape changer, you can act yourself as a changer (chg-manual), 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.

Credits

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