There's a little bit of culture clash going on here, I think :-) On Tue, Aug 31, 2004 at 04:29:43PM -0400, Joe Konecny wrote: > Even on Sat and Sun when I'm not > there the tape is still over written with the latest data.
The *last* thing I would *ever* want to do is to overwrite my most recent good backup. What if the current backup fails? [*] Then I've lost them both. The very idea makes me cringe! Given a choice between (a) overwriting last night's backup and (b) failing to take tonight's backup, I'd reluctantly choose the latter. Admittedly, your site's needs might be different from ours, such that a choice that none of us would make, is the right one in your case. But really, I'd much prefer not to have to make that choice at all -- neither (a) nor (b) is very appealing -- and Amanda, used as we've described, gets me out of having to take either risk. [*] System crash, bug in the backup system (Amanda or otherwise), the heads need cleaning, the tape goes bad, the data won't fit on the tape, an attempt to back up a file as it's being written leads to an inconsistent image on the tape, or any of a dozen other failure modes, many of which are orders of magnitude more likely than a disk crash. > If Amanda does only copies the data to a holding area and > we lose a drive on Sunday night I have massive problems. > That's what I call a disaster It's only a disaster if the holding "area" is on the same physical drive as the live data. So don't do that! Besides the robustness problem you've mentioned, it's also bad for backup performance. Put it on its own spindle. -- | | /\ |-_|/ > Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont. [EMAIL PROTECTED] | | / It must be said that they would have sounded better if the singer wouldn't throw his fellow band members to the ground and toss the drum kit around during songs. - Patrick Lenneau