Chris, We seem to be doing the same thing. We are doing it for the same reason. I went a little more finely grained as I had about 1200 user accounts and some stored quite a bit of data in their home directories, vs the group samba share or data directories for projects (usually on the compute engine or cluster, rather than the home directory server). [Latest storage server came in the door with 250 Tbytes of space]
Note that I have ‘a’ to ‘z’ and then the catch-all that never catches anything, but that is expected and fits in with Debra’s comments. I always worry about the leading dot to anchor the path, but we did it the same. That is why I copied the two near each other, for easy comparison. You can see the tar commands in the log files, what do you catch if you run the tar command manually? Could it be a permissions problem for Amanda to read the user files? Your syntax fileserver "/netdrives/CAMPUS/af" "/netdrives/CAMPUS" { comp-tar include "./[a-f]*" estimate server } my syntax finsen /export/home-A /export/home { user-tar2 include "./[a]*" } finsen /export/home-AZ /export/home { user-tar2 include "./[A-Z]*" } I’ve removed all but the last email you wrote from this email, it was getting long for little or no gain. From: Chris Nighswonger <cnighswon...@foundations.edu> Sent: Thursday, November 8, 2018 1:25 PM To: Cuttler, Brian R (HEALTH) <brian.cutt...@health.ny.gov> Cc: amanda-users@amanda.org Subject: Re: Breaking DLEs up ATTENTION: This email came from an external source. Do not open attachments or click on links from unknown senders or unexpected emails. No question is stupid. I learned that beating my head against the wall for long hours. :-) /netdrives/CAMPUS/ is a path which contains users' network drives. The level below CAMPUS contains folders which follow the naming convention of the username of each account. ie. Chris Nighswonger would be cnighswonger and thus /netdrives/CAMPUS/cnighswonger/ would be my related network drive. There are somewhat less than 100 user directories. Prior to this I have been backing them all up with a DLE which looks like this: host "/netdrives/CAMPUS" { comp-tar estimate server } This works fine with the caveat that it results in a huge level 0 backup. In the supplied disklist file example in Amanda's documentation (/usr/share/doc/amanda-server/examples/disklist), I discovered the DLE form I am currently attempting. According to the example this should limit each DLE to backing up subdirectories of /netdrives/CAMPUS/ based on the regexp supplied in the "include" directive. It appears to me that something may have changed with the way Amanda handles this since that document was written. As Stefan points out, Amanda seems to thing that there is "nothing" to be backed up. Furthermore, it appears that the log excerpts I posted also show that the regexp is not being applied but that Amanda is actually looking for specific subdirectories like /netdrives/CAMPUS/af and the like. Maybe the DLE syntax is incorrect?