Which reminds me...If cost is a factor, now that FILE-DRIVER is an option, RAID or removable hard drives may give you a better $/GB ratio than tapes, and much more capacity than CD-R. I think this is a very good option for a single computer or small network like Justin described in his original e-mail. If you use removable drives or a RAID-1, you might not need anything else, though it would be a good idea to still dump more important files to tape or writable DVD media occasionally. I haven't investigated it, but I have heard of hot-swap external SATA and firewire options which would be very good indeed.
250 GB removable drives could be a great option if you are backing up large partitions, say up to 500 GB uncompressed, so that you could get around dumps not fitting on a single tape without having to use RAIT with multiple tape drives, or very expensive tape drives and media, or split up dumps with (IMHO inefficient and CPU/IO intensive) GNUTAR. In my case, I am using a 1 TB Snap Server 4500 in a RAID-5 configuration and flushing mostly just the full dumps to 200/100 GB LTO (Ultrium-1). Since RAID-5 has less redundancy than RAID-1, I am more concerned about having at least some dumps on tape since a 2-disk failure would mean that all of the data on the RAID-5 would be gone. On Sun, 2004-05-02 at 20:53, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > In my Amanda experience, I was lucky enough to have a > large holding disk area and a tape drive which failed > spectacularly before even one backup was flushed. It gave > me the opportunity to see how Amanda works. The most > wonderful aspect was how happy "she" was to restore > from the holding disk. --jonathan