Instead, it says, if a backup is level 0, can it be buffered on the holding disk. If the reserve parameter is set to 100, then 100% of the holding disk space can be used only for incrementals. All level 0's will go straight to tape. If the reserve is set to 25%, then that portion can only be used to buffer incrementals while the other 75% of the holding disk can be used for either level 0's or incrementals as needed.
$(prefix)/share/amanda/WHATS.NEW says that this applies only in degraded mode. Before I put in 'reserve 50' I was seeing level 0s on holding disk, but amanda would not _start_ any level 0s if the tape was missing or had failed. I do something similar to Glenn, but for a different reason. I do 'archive' runs on the weekend to holding disk, and flush them during the day on Monday. This avoids backing up active filesystems (and the slowness from that), and the tape drive is idle then. I set reserve to 0 so I can use the whole holding disk - each week does 10G of level 0s, with skip-incr. Quoting the docs: * LEVEL-0 DUMPS ALLOWED WITH NO TAPE If there is no tape present (or the tape drive fails during dumping), Amanda switches to degraded mode. In degraded mode, level-0 dumps are not allowed. This can be a pain for unattended sites over the weekend (especially when there is a large holding disk that can hold any necessary dumps). Amanda now supports a new configuration file directive, "reserve". This tells Amanda to reserve that percentage of total holding disk space for degraded mode dumps. Example: your total holding disk space adds up to 8.4GB. If you specify a reserve of 50, 4.2GB (50%) of the holding disk space will be allowed to be used for regular dumps, but if that limit is hit, Amanda will switch to degraded dumps. For backward compatibility, if no 'reserve' keyword is present, 100 will be assumed (e.g. never do full dumps if degraded mode is in effect). NOTE: this percentage applies from run to run, so, as in the previous example, when Amanda runs the next day, if there is 3.8GB left on the holding disk, 1.9GB will be reserved for degraded mode dumps (e.g. the percentage keeps sliding). -- Greg Troxel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>