Having a copy of the previous dump's index at the beginning of the a tape, along with a utility that reads the tape and generates an index of the data currently on it would work fine.
Way back when I owned a 486, I had a tape drive (an Eagle Travan if I remember correctly) that did that. Since I only had one machine there wasn't anywhere else to store the index. I think that it worked quite well, and saved me from disaster on a few occasions. My index directory is currently 107MB. I do currently copy it to another computer on-site, but it's a little bit too large to e-mail off site. Anyway, another computer on-site works fine only so long as the disaster I am recovering from isn't building-wide, like a fire or earthquake. I suppose I could write it to CD and take that off-site, but why should I need both a tape and CD off-site? I suppose that if I add my index directory to the disklist as it's own entry (instead of being nested as it is now), I could write a script to read the tape and generate an index. I would then know where on the tape the old indexes are and could pull them off as well. That shouldn't be too difficult. I think that I will give it a shot when I get some spare time. Gotta love OSS. If it doesn't do what you want, change it so it does! Anthony On Wed, 2002-09-18 at 15:10, Niall O Broin wrote: > On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 02:29:58PM -0800, Anthony Valentine wrote: > > > Question: Can Amanda be setup so that it writes a copy of it's indexes > > to the beginning of each tape? > > > > I realize that I can add the filesystem that holds the indexes to my > > disklist, but then I won't know where on the tape it is. If it were > > always the first thing after the label I could easily find it in an > > emergency. > > That'd be a nice feature, but then a lot of things about time travel might > be nice :-) I don't think it can be done in the general case, because taping > will usually have started before the indices would be updated. > > Of course in the case of an emergency such that you need to get the indices > from tape, I suppose having on on the last tape a copy of the indices > correct as to the previous tape would be a whole lot better than nothing. > > What I, and I think many others, do is to copy the indices to a different > disk after each daily Amanda run which gives you a little insurance against > a disk crash. As I write this it occurs to me that the indices are not so > big that it would be unreasonable to also ship them offsite somewhere also, > presuming that you have access to such a place. You could even simply email > them to youself at a special account on a non-company mailserver. > > > > Kindest regards, > > > > Niall O Broin -- UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things.
