Hello, Amanda users -
Our site is growing quite disenchanted with our current backup solution,
and I am currently evaluating Amanda as a possible alternative. It
seems to have been designed with the right client/server attitude that
we are looking for in order to backup our huge site (300 clients,
probably around 200 GB/day).
Since we have a lot of data that needs to move, we have several high-end
DLT tape drives and tape libraries at our disposal, and my purpose so
far has been to try to teach Amanda how to use them effectively.
However, Amanda seems to be somewhat limited in its design for multiple
drives and libraries, and I'm wondering if it's just me, and I'm missing
something, or if it really is a limitation of Amanda's design. At
least, the version I'm looking at, Amanda 2.4.1p1.
For instance, Amanda's tape-changer interface seems to be geared towards
the type of changer that has no idea what tape is in what slot. Amanda
seems to just want to grab a tape, put it in the drive, and read the
label, rather than simply ask the library which slot holds the
particular tape Amanda wants. Is this the case?
Also, I can't help but notice that Amanda's documentation and interface
specifications always refer to "the tape drive," as if it were only
possible to have one drive attached to a machine. The tape-changer
interface has the ability to return more than one tape drive name, but I
get the feeling that this is only for using multiple tape drives as if
they were a stacker, that is, write to the first drive until it is full,
then write to the second drive until it is full. The two drives are not
written in parallel. Is this true?
If I understand things correctly, the only way I can get Amanda to use
multiple drives in parallel would be to create multiple "instances" of
Amanda and give each one a different tape drive. This seems like a
difficult and error-prone method to use for a large site, trying to
remember which clients are backed up with which instance of Amanda.
But perhaps I've missed something. Have I?
--
David DeSimone | "The doctrine of human equality reposes on this:
[EMAIL PROTECTED] | that there is no man really clever who has not
Hewlett-Packard | found that he is stupid." -- Gilbert K. Chesterson
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