Hello Howard,
There are two solutions that I have used in this situation:
1) If you can handle a few minutes of down time, like on a home PC or
personal workstation, you could use "ghosting" to a removable disk
drive. This is probably OK for a home PC or another situation where you
can handle losing some data, because if both disks fail, you would lose
everything, so that is why it's a good idea to remove the backup disk
and store it offline. Or, if you are on a network, the backup disk
could be on a another computer. (NB: In case you were thinking of it,
RAID1 or simple mirroring is NOT a backup solution and will not cover
you for eg. if a hacker trashes the filesystem).
2) You could use amanda to do backups to holding disk most of the time,
and flush the dumps to tape when the holding disk is getting full.
Since you have 40/80 tapes, if you use software data compression, you
would want about 40 GB holding disk to get the most out of the tape. If
you can use an IDE disk like ATA-100, in the US you can get a 40 GB disk
for about $120-150 USD (see www.megahaus.com for example). If you look
for a close-out you can probably get it even cheaper, but may have
problems getting a warranty replacement if it fails. If both disks
fail, you will lose everything up to the last time that you flushed the
holding disk to tape. For this reason, it would be better to use
another computer as the backup server if possible.
Howard Zhou wrote:
>
> If I have a single server to backup with 4Gb of data backed up to a 40-80Gb
> tape without a tape changer, would amanda do the job? To my understanding,
> amanda does append to a tape. Without appending, you have to put in a new
> tape everyday for a small amount of incremental backup data on 40-80Gb tape
> (what a waste) plus manual process.
>
> Is there any plan to support appending to tape in a future release?
>
> Is there any other free backup system which supports this feature?
>
> Thanks in advance.
>
> Howard
--
"Jonathan F. Dill" ([EMAIL PROTECTED])
