On Thu, 20 Jun 2002 at 12:42pm, Steve Follmer wrote > disk-to-disk backup is an idea whose time has come. I am prepared to > believe that Amanda is wonderful (the Samba backup was a snap!), but it > seems a bit old fashioned compared to say, Second Copy 2000.
I have no idea what Second Copy is (aside: quick look, ah, ok), but the target audiences are completely different. Amanda is aimed at networks of *nix machines. The beauty of amanda is that it scales easily from a single machine to several hundred, based on backup hardware. And it is anything but old fashioned. > What happens is if I just have one file:/backup/data directory, it gets > erased and a full backup takes place every night. This might be > acceptable but I'm exposed for the time that the backup takes place. Why > doesn't amanda simply add incrementals to the one existing "tape" > (file)? On tape, appending is Bad. > I probably must do what an earlier Bickle post described (more detail in > the egroup)... "To rotate 'tapes', i recommend creating sub-directories > and symbolically linking them to a 'data' subdirectory, which amlabel et > al will look for. The directories are labelled like tapes. I name the > subdirectories according to date, then i have a shell script which > creates a new directory every night, makes the symlink, labels the tape > then runs the backup. Why not just use a "changer"? That's the best way to do this. I found this after a bit of looking: http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg07758.html Define as many tapes as you want in your changer, and you'll get your incrementals. > file-driver pure-disk backups. I also humbly suggest that the typical > amanda user and typical equipment cost has changed over the decades of > amanda, and that future versions could emphasize pure disk backup more. And I would humbly suggest that you're probably wrong. Yes, there are more home users backing up small networks now, and disk is cheap (which is why file: exists at all). But I would bet that the majority of users (and certainly the majority of amanda-backed-up data) use tape. I consider myself a pretty small install, and I backup nearly 600GB of data using amanda. In corporate (and edu) environments, tapes still have lots of advantages over disks, not the least of which is off-site storage. -- Joshua Baker-LePain Department of Biomedical Engineering Duke University
