On Wed, Sep 22, 2010 at 8:05 PM, Christ Schlacta <aarc...@aarcane.org> wrote: > Why keep a backup server up 24/7 when it only works durring bakup hours?
Often the backup backup server is a server ordinarily devoted to other purposes, with a few megs available for catalogs. > Why not append the entire catalog to each tape? Or at least the entire > catalog to date? Well, the second question suggests a strict interpretation of "entire" as "all tapes written past, present and future." And obviously that's impossible without time-travel. :) I did outline some of the downsides of writing the present catalog, or (worse) past and present, to tape. In particular, the EOM problem worries me, since a lot of Amanda users now utilize the flush-threshold-* parameters to fill tapes to 100%, leaving 0% over for the catalog. Tapes don't generally give you any indication of how close they are to EOM, so there's no good way to say "my catalog's about 30M, so only write dumps up until 30M from the end." It's a bit of a wonky solution to get catalog data that may be better backed or regenerated up in other ways. That's the bottom line, IMHO. By the way, the amrecatalog utility that I mentioned earlier would be pretty easy to write. Amrestore would provide a nice basis for it. Dustin -- Open Source Storage Engineer http://www.zmanda.com
