Gene, > While I'm not familiar with your setup Ivan, an 8 hour runtime would > seem to indicate configuration problems, like doing all compression > on the server rather than offloading it to the clients, possibly a > high rate of network errors due to bad cabling or any combination of > all the things that Murphy guy can dream up.
The server and the client are on the same host. For one of my test sets, I was backing up NFS-mounted files to another NFS-mounted volumes as illustrated below. [Host A, NFS server] -- Hard Drive X, Hard Drive Y | [Host B, NFS client, amanda server, amanda client] Here I used Host B to backup files on Hard Drive X to a set of "virtual tapes" on Hard Drive Y. I have another configuration which I have been running for 2-3 weeks now. This one does use real tapes, but it still gets its files via NFS. [Host A, NFS server] -- Hard Drive X | [Host B, NFS client, amanda server, amanda client] -- Tape drive Here I use Host B to back up files on Hard Drive X to the tape drive. Yes, this is not the most optimum hardware configuration, but it is dictated by other operational constraints. Also, for this set, I have over 100GB of data, which works out to be about 30GB (both levels 0 and 1) spread out over a cycle of 4 days and 5 tapes. Each nightly run takes 4 hours--uncompressed. I might try turning on software compression and see if, after one night of needing 8 hrs to run to gather the compression ratios, it will settle back to the 4 hr run time. But at this point, I also don't have a real need for compression for the following reasons. Please tell me if you think any of them is silly. - I like the idea of a 1-week tape cycle, with only 4 runs and using 5 tapes each week. I don't wish to make the cycle any smaller because I like to have several days' worth of backup. - With my amount of data (100+ GB), Amanda only fills each AIT-2 50GB tapes to about 60% capacity (~30GB). - Software/hardware compression will not reduce the number of tapes per cycle for as long as I choose to have a 4-run/5-tape cycle. It will only reduce the amount of data dumped onto each tape. - Had Amanda allowed us to append tapes, then I probably could have turned on compression, and expect to save 50% in tapes. But since each run needs to use one tape, whether it fills it 1% or 100%, I don't see any benefit in using compression. Any thoughts? Thanks. Ivan