On Fri, 2013-10-04 at 17:23 -0400, Michael Stauffer wrote: > Hi, > Hello!
> I'm thinking about switching to Amanda. I inherited a Bacula-based > backup system (old version 3) and the server's drives are failing so > I'm going to deploy a new server and am considering switching to > Amanda at the same time. > > My setup: I need to backup 2 linux file servers, each hostinng a > RAID's, sizes ~36TB and ~28TB. The raids full yet but let's assume > we'll get close to full eventually. I have a 2-drive (LTO-5), 30-tape > Quantum tape library. In addition, I'll probably back up the /etc dirs > of a few servers. > Your setup would be fairly straightforward in Amanda. > From what I've read, Amanda could be a better choice for me than > Bacula since mine is a pretty straight-forward setup. Does that seem > right? Bacula's been something of a beast for me, especially when I > had a catalog meltdown and had to restore the catalog piecemeal from > tape. > > I have a number of questions. I'll post some here, and then some in > followup posts to keep it manageable. Thanks for any help! > > 1) I'm curious about how often amanda is updated, approximately. I see > the current version was released June 2013. How about the previous > release of 3.x? > Recently, it has been about every 6 months. 3.3.2 was released July 2012 with 3.3.3 release Jan 2013 followed by 3.3.4 last June/July. > 2) Is it clear whether it's better to use the amanda.org mailing lists > or the forums on zmanda.com? The mailing lists seem significantly > slower than Bacula's. Is Amanda less widely used? Or maybe that's > because there are fewer problems with Amanda? :) > Both mailing lists and forums are regularly watched so it is your pick which you prefer working with. There is a large Amanda users base but I cannot compare with Bacula and its mailing list. Hopefully it is just due to less problems in Amanda :-) > 3) Are multi-drive tape changers directly supported? If I run amanda > and multiple clients need backing up, amanda will use both tape drives > simultaneously? > Yes. If there are multiple objects to back up and Amanda estimates that it will ultimately need to write all the data to more than 1 tape, it will load up to this number of tapes into drives and begin writing data to multiple drives simultaneously. > 4) Anyway to find out if my Quantum Scalar I-500 tape library is > supported? The link on the site regarding supported tape devices is > dead. It seems Amanda uses low-level tape commands, so it shouldn't be > an issue? Anything to test it's compatibility? > Amanda depends on the system to correctly recognize the robot and tape devices and the UNIX mt and mtx commands to work with the tape drives and robot respectively. If Quantum claims to support the OS you plan to use as the backup server and this library can be operated with the mt and mtx command, Amanda should be able to work with the library correctly. > 5) Many links on the FAQ and wiki pages are dead. Is that an ongoing > issue or just temporary? It doesn't bode too well for the > documentation. > I am seeing that several of the FAQ links do not appear to be going where they should be. I did a quick fix on these. I am not immediately finding such links to be incorrect on wiki in general, however. Feel free to point out any that I am missing I will look into these. Paul
