On Wed, 7 Feb 2001, John R. Jackson wrote:
> >What would it take to have some sort of config option that did exactly
> >that? ...
>
> Nothing. It's already there. Just leave the tape out of the drive and
> make as many runs as you want into the holding disk. At your convenience,
> run "amflush" and select "all" instead of a specific holding area
> to flush.
Okay, but now we're back to requiring manual intervention here to load
that tape and do the amflush ... what about an automatic feature for this?
The reasons for not appending are in the FAQ, but I'd think a good work
around would be exactly the above ... don't write to tape until we can
fill the tape. If that happens to be daily, so be it ... if once its
after 3 days, and the next 2, so be it ... but it should be something that
is done without human intervention until we run out of tapes to write to
...
Basically, right now, we write to tape when one file system is done
backing up ... wait, now I just confused myself ...
What is the difference between what happens now (you write a file system
to tape, when the next one is ready, you spin up the tape and write the
next one to tape) and appending to tape? Doesn't either risk that whole
'SCSI might reverse tape while we aren't using it" scenario? :( Or do we
rely on the amanda process holding a good lock on the tape to prevent the
OS from accidentally rewinding it?
