Dustin J. Mitchell wrote at 14:56 -0500 on Sep 13, 2010: > On Mon, Sep 13, 2010 at 2:43 PM, Brian Cuttler <[email protected]> wrote: > > Virtual DLEs !?! > > > > That is EXACTLY what we need ! > > > > I know you warned us, but I'm REALLY Excited about this ! > > > > That would _so_ fix my Terrabyte sized DLE problem... > > Yes, yes it would. It would fix a lot of problems! > > I don't think it's the right solution to the problem, though. It > takes as fundamental Amanda's funny notion of DLEs and exclusion > lists, and tries to build a working system around that. If it could > work in a way that makes any sense to the user, I might be convinced, > but as it stands there are some *very* significant unanswered > questions, and probably a lot of more subtle problems, too. > > Instead, we should look at how other backup software handles similar > problems, and consider throwing out some long-standing Amanda > weakne^Wfeatures. You can see why this becomes a contentious issue > very quickly.
One big weakness I always decry is that amanda can't automatically balance (even possibly with a hint from the admin) DLE sizes. Consider how many times you have had to manually break up a DLE because it takes too long to back up (hits a timeout) or exceeds certain system capacities - holding disk, tape, etc. Well, with split dumps, tape size is less of a problem for this issue these days. This is a separate issue from renaming DLEs. Well, at least, I wasn't thinking of it being the same. However, I can see how a similar mechanism could be leveraged for various uses (including meta-DLEs, DLE groups, balanced DLE dump sizing). [Subject changed to reflect the thread hijack^W^Wchange in scope] This has a lot of possibilities and could quickly get hard to bite off a piece to implement. I suppose it would be good to take a little time to implement a good solid base for a few potential flavors of feature candy in this area.
