[email protected] (Pouya Tafti) writes: >Would manually switching tapes be an option with amanda (I'm >tape-naive and don't want to invest in a library)?
Amanda can notify you when a tape needs to be changed. Amanda was made to backup many machines, e.g. workstations in a student lab. For a seamless backup, all data is usually written to a holding disk first and then copied to tape. This allows to save data from many clients concurrently. You can run without a holding disk, but then there is only one backup concurrently per tape drive and when the tape is full, backup stops until you replace the tape. With amanda you also don't necessarily fill tapes. You create a schedule (e.g. daily) and then have tape sets for each backup run, you can then easily re-use older tape sets, move them out for off-site storage or expire worn out tapes. N.B. I use amanda, but with "virtual" tapes (partitions on a portable HDD).
