ghe <[email protected]> writes: > Stan and Debra have convinced me to bite the bullet and buy a new tape. > I've never been in this situation before (the DLT drive used to fail > every once in a while, but a couple hours with a jeweler's screwdriver > got it going again). > > Looks like I'm going to have a spare, mildly flaky, tape around.
You mean that all your backups were on a single tape? That is beyond daring IMHO. Like Gene mentioned, I have moved to disk and vtapes, never had a problem with the disks holding the vtape, I had problems with the disk with the holding disk though, it started develop bad blocks in the holding disk partition, but vtapes? They are hardly used, if you unmount/stop them after the backups are written, they can last a long time. And when you need more space, you just upgrade with newer disks with more capacity and store the old disks, so you even have offline old stuff. Your slots need to be numbered starting from 1, but the tapes number can start from the next number in sequence in your tape naming scheme, so keep the old disks. You will change them because you need more backup storage, not because they fail (never had since I use disks, while I had to replace the tapes a number of times). I started with 7x512GB disks, then 7x1.5TB and am now at 7x3TB and never had the slightest problem. Admittedly, the size of the vtapes chosen at first looks a bit tiny nowdays, but with vtapes, it really adds very little overhead, largely compensated by avoiding half full tapes. When we were hit by the great flood and we had to move the datacenter, I took the disks, but not Amanda server, as I knew I could connect the disk directly inside any server to do a restore. And no fiddling with mounting and dismounting tapes every day, I have a system with all my vtapes available all the time. In a similar way to what Gene described, after the dump, I get a copy of the indexes, etc. and rsync that to a database server and mail myself a copy, I end up with 5 or 6 copies of that critical information (because database and mail are backed up too). And remeber, tapes do rub on the R/W head of the tape drive so doing an amcheckdump does double the wear and tear of the tape. No physical contact between the head and support on disk. Not to mention that disks are way faster... Best regards, Olivier
