Greetings. We've been happily running Amanda on a number of different
systems around here for several years. Up to this point, we've always used
a single tape drive (usually high-capacity) on each tape server. Now we're
getting to the point where disk capacity is exploding. Tape capacity is
increasing as well, of course, but it appears that we'll soon be in a
situation where one large tape drive will be inadequate. Maybe we're there
already.
This has lead us to consider alternatives to our somewhat simple-minded
approach to backups. One alternative would be to make finer subdivisions
of the file systems that we back up (with GNU tar). I.e., instead of
backing up simply:
/home
we might put separate entries in the disklist file for:
/home/annie
/home/bob
.
.
.
/home/zelda
or whatever. That seems mildly tedious and probably would cause us at
least to have to modify our number of tapes per cycle, buy additional
tapes, etc.
Another thought we had was to throw additional money at the problem and buy
some kind of tape changer. But I have what seems to me to be a fundamental
question about changers that I don't see answered in the FAQ's or .../docs,
etc. I.e., if we have some kind of a tape changer, does it allow us to
exceed Amanda's one-tape-per-session limit? Can we make a single "virtual"
tape out of multiple tapes in the changer? Or is it the function of the
tape changer simply to let Amanda run unattended for as many sessions as
there are tapes in the changer, but still using only one tape per session?
Thanks.
- Mike
==========
Michael Hannon mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
Dept. of Physics 530.752.4966
University of California 530.752.4717 FAX
Davis, CA 95616-8677
