How do I get off this list? I used to use Amanda, and I'm grateful for many (!) years of good service from it, but I finally got tired of changing tapes and worrying about them, and I didn't want to buy expensive new tape equipment and even-more-expensive tapes just to keep using Amanda. (Unlike the current occupants of the White House, I don't depend on tape recycling to excuse the destruction of evidence of my bad behaviors.) The modern Amanda solution of using disks as if they were tapes just doesn't make sense to me. Why pretend that these things are tapes? So I wrote my own system in Python, and it's now working well enough that I've turned off Amanda forever. It's not that I don't like Amanda. I just don't like tapes, or tape drives, and I don't see why tape-like files are necessary or good. The tape metaphor seems like a hairball to me, now that disks and Linux software RAIDs are so cheap and easy. And with my own system, I'm now free to script all the things that Amanda, with all its complexity and generality, discouraged me from scripting: the capture of VMware NTFS flat memory files only when I'm doing a level 0 backup of what's in them, the use of reverse ssh tunnels to back up our notebooks when they're away from home, etc. (I began to be serious about building my own system when I learned on this list that automating the backups of roving notebooks are problematic for Amanda.) I'm also freer to integrate the Transparent Archivist (http://www.flaterco.com/ta/ta.html) with it in an intimate way. Of course, my approach isn't for everybody. It's not general. It only works for Unix boxes, and only through ssh. It's really just for my company, with its peculiar needs and resources, which include a dedicated web server.
Anyway, I don't think I have anything more to contribute to this list, or it to me, and so I think it would be good for me to stop receiving this mail. Unfortunately, it's not obvious how to do that, which is the reason for this note. -- Steve Steven R. Newcomb, Consultant Coolheads Consulting Co-editor, Topic Maps International Standard (ISO/IEC 13250) Co-editor, draft Topic Maps -- Reference Model (ISO/IEC 13250-5) [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.coolheads.com direct: +1 910 363 4032 main: +1 910 363 4033 fax: +1 910 454 8461 268 Bonnet Way Southport, North Carolina 28461 USA (This communication is not private. Since the destruction of the 1978 Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act by the U.S. Congress on August 5, 2007, no electronic communications of innocent citizens are exempt from unsupervised and unwarranted inspection by the U.S. government.)
