On Wed, 2 Feb 2005, Mike Delaney wrote: > On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 10:43:50AM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote: > > On Wednesday 02 February 2005 04:12, Mike Delaney wrote: > > [...] > > >> >Has anyone used a REV drive with Amanda? > > >> > > >> I can imagine that it may be possible, with some variation of the > > >> FILE: device, and as Jon mentioned, they have a 10 disk changer > > >> available which to me, would make it *much* more appealing given a > > >> reasonable price for both the drive and the media.. > > > > > >Single drives retail for ~ $350 - $450 depending on type (internal > > > IDE, external USB, etc.). Media lists for ~ $50 ea. The > > > autoloader appears to list for ~ $2200. So the hardware is a bit > > > cheaper than a (new) comparable capacity tape unit, but the media > > > is more expensive. > > > > Humm, thats not too bad, although the $ for the changer would scare > > this SS recipient off I'm afraid. As would a fifty per disk when the > > tapelist gets up towards 20 or so. OTOH, with that 36GB capacity, I > > could do a dumpcycle of 2 days here, so I'd only need 4 or 5. > > Yeah, running a traditonal Amanda setup with that kind of media cost > gets a bit pricey. One thing you could do with them, since they're > random access media, is to setup a chg-disk library of several smaller > vtapes on each, and treat the REV disks as magazines.
Which brings us again to the multi-level vtape backup problem: you have some (recent) vtapes on the local disk, and others on removable disks. Could this be modelled as a multi-level changer? I.e. your single virtual tape drive is mounted in a changer, which has access to all vtapes on the local disk (through chg-disk). To access other vtapes, the correct removable disk has to be mounted. Given the current price/space ratio for (expensive) tape drives and (cheap) removable (USB/IEEE1394/REV) disks, vtapes sound like the most suitable solution for people with a limited budget. Gr{oetje,eeting}s, Geert -- Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- [EMAIL PROTECTED] In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that. -- Linus Torvalds