Thanks to everyone who reponded, much appreciated.

> I've mainly used dump in the past as it was much quicker than my

I'm sticking with dump.  I will setup a separate config for doing
archival saves in a portable format like cpio or tar.

> 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().

Thanks again to those who pointed out that amanda does not actually
use rsh.  I've again dissabled it in my inetd.conf and amcheck at
least thinks everything still works.  BTW, I think it might be better
if the pkg defaulted to building amanda to use .amadahosts.

Several people pointed out that s/w compression would give better
results (space wise) than drive compression.
Greg Woods made some important points re the risks of compression.

I'm planning to use s/w compression for now - and rely on redundant
backups to cover disasters.

On the drive compression issue, I'll follow up in a sec with a new
question about st minor numbers and modes.

Thanks again to all.

--sjg