Rod Roberts wrote:
>
> I have seen previous articles about using hard drives for backup by
> tweaking the "reserve" percentage for the holding disk.
I also plan to use a character device (magneto-optical drive) for dumps
with AMANDA. Of course, writing a driver that makes a block device out
of a character one (as suggested by David), or waiting for the
DUMPER-API to come, might be solutions, but they do not work *now*.
Here's what I came up with (and plan to implement):
1) Don't change anything, no multiple configurations, nothing such.
2) You have to have a tape drive (sorry Rod ;-) )
3) The tapes capacity should be as large as your
MO-disk's/CD-ROM's/whatever random access medium you choose.
4) The number of disk media should be exactly the number of your tapes.
For best convenience, you should manually label them with the same
names as your tapes (you can do this also electronically, by using the
-L option to mke2fs, when you first create the filesystem on them ;-) ).
Now, when you run AMANDA, you simply let *no tape* in the drive. This
forces all the output (remember to tweak "reserve"!) to the holding
disk. After the dumps are finished, you copy them from the holding disk
to the disk medium. Then, you run amflush. Oh, nearly forgotten, the
tape should have the same label as the disk you just used, so you'd
better choose the disk according to the tape's name ;-)
This solution has the advantage that the index database is correct for
both the tapes and the disks. Also, you don't change anything in your
configuration and just run AMANDA as usual. You don't have to "cheat"
AMANDA either. You get the added result of tape backups, just in case
your MO-disks/CD-ROMs/CD-RWs/DVDs got corrupted ;-) (you see here? the
point of view has changed!).
You are limited to using the same capacity for both types of media
though (which leads to just using the minimum of both).
This should get you running, until one of the other solutions becomes
reality :-)
--
Regards
Chris Karakas
Don´t waste your cpu time - crack rc5: http://www.distributed.net
