I for one am glad that amanda has grown beyond its unix/tape roots to support samba/windows and to support file: disk backups. This does not have to be sacrificed, in adding even more robust support for file: and also, some SWAT like GUI. And this would make amanda more useful for more people, if the amanda community wants to go in that direction. Though there will be conflicts; appending is bad on tape, good on disk. Explicitly specifying incremental backups is bad for large networks, but I would desire it for my small network. That said, certainly there are windows and mac clients in the large commercial/university installations that characterize the bulk of amanda users.
I admit that the majority of existing amanda users use tape, but its a biased legacy sample. But let us not ignore the possible users represented by the exponential growth in home networks, linux, and cheap disks; a growing audience of users like myself, for whom disk backup is better than none, who don't have the money to sink into a tape system, and who don't see enough upside (what are the odds that 2 drives in different machines will die on the same day) on changing and labeling tapes and shipping them off to the abandoned limestone mine. I appreciate your advice about the autochanger and will explore that. Cheers, Steve -----Original Message----- From: Joshua Baker-LePain [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Friday, June 21, 2002 6:05 AM To: Steve Follmer Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: 2.4.3 Tapeless file-driver pure-disk backups 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
