On Wed, 10 Apr 2002, David Flood wrote:
> What are the advantages/disadvantages of using the holding disk?
> What are the advantages/disadvantages of dumping stuff straight to
> tape?
Advantages of holding disk:
* Better tape throughput, better tape reliability because you can stream
your tapedrive.
* you can be backing up multiple clients at the same time, each writing
to the holding disk, and then spool them out later.
* You can keep some dump images on the holding disk and restore from
them without fetching a tape.
Disadvantages:
* You need a big enough holding disk to be useful.
> We have a tapeserver which is our fileserver and as such is just
> backing itself up. When we upgraded from 2.4.1p1 to 2.4.2p2 the
> backups suddenly started taking longer. It's just accured to me one
> of the differences I had to make that could be causing this. That is
> a negative chunksize was no longer supported in 2.4.2p2. A
> negative chunksize meant that all dumps larger than the chunksize
> value was dumped straight to disk.
I never used amanda with negative chunksizes, so I can't help you
here. The chunksize doesn't have anything to do with whether something
is put on disk, it just says what the biggest "chunk" of a backup
image will be put in one file in that disk.
The size of your holding disk, in combination with the "reserve" value,
and any "holdingdisk" flag on the particular dumptype is what determines
what gets dumped to disk versus directly to tape.
> So I'm thinking about testing the backups on that server without
> using the holding disk. How is this done, is there a way of
> specifying it in the amanda.conf for all dumptypes as well as
> somehow specifying it for individual dumptypes?
-----
Marc Mengel <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
