Save a machine's last backup forever?

[hymie0]

So .. I've got my Amanda backups running smoothly. I have an external hard disk with 200 virtual tapes, and an official "dumpcycle" of 30 days, but with 200 tapes, it goes back a lot further.

A machine (named "laptop") died, let's say on October 31st. I would like to save the last backup forever, just in case.

I guess what I could do is go looking for every file named "laptop" , find the most recent full backup of each disk, copy it and any matching file newer than it to some safe place, and I should be good.

What I'd like to do is create a virtual tape, let's say, tape number 999, and have Amanda "move" all of the backups to that virtual tape. That tape would not be in the recycling group, so it will always be there. And next year, when I need to look something up, hopefully I can tell Amanda "Go get tape number 999"

Or am I over-thinking things, and I should just go with my first idea of copying the files to a safe space, using the dd command to convert them from Amanda files to Tar files, and just keep them that way?