I've just finished setting up amanda here (been on my todo list for
over a year :-) and am trying to decide whether I should use dump or
gnu tar and would appreciate opinions of others.

I've mainly used dump in the past as it was much quicker than my
perl/cpio backup stuff.  I suspect that dump will also be quicker than
gnu tar (just from watching gnu tar last night "estimating" how big
backups were going to be), but I know dump is a tad risky on live
filesystems.

I do have non-netbsd systems here, but all support dump, and most
contain only their OS.

I note that the example disklist shows a strong preference for dump.
Is that just historical?

I also noted that the example disklist shows a prefernce for
compressing dumps - but my DAT (Seagate/Archive python) drive does
compression so I assume its better to let the tape drive do it?
Just letting the drive do compression would certainly help amanda with
its tape space estimates.

Input appreciated.

Also, I was a bit reluctant to re-enable rsh on my systems - even
though it is blocked at the ppp link.  Has anyone hacked amanda to use
ssh?  Otherwise I might just munge it to use ssl_rcmd().

--sjg