Paul, thanks much for the replies, this is very helpful. I'll ask some more questions in another thread. BTW does this list prefer top- or bottom-posting, or no preference?
-M On Fri, Oct 4, 2013 at 7:08 PM, Paul Yeatman <pyeat...@zmanda.com> wrote: > On Fri, 2013-10-04 at 17:23 -0400, Michael Stauffer wrote: >> Hi, >> > > Hello! > >> I'm thinking about switching to Amanda. I inherited a Bacula-based >> backup system (old version 3) and the server's drives are failing so >> I'm going to deploy a new server and am considering switching to >> Amanda at the same time. >> >> My setup: I need to backup 2 linux file servers, each hostinng a >> RAID's, sizes ~36TB and ~28TB. The raids full yet but let's assume >> we'll get close to full eventually. I have a 2-drive (LTO-5), 30-tape >> Quantum tape library. In addition, I'll probably back up the /etc dirs >> of a few servers. >> > > Your setup would be fairly straightforward in Amanda. > >> From what I've read, Amanda could be a better choice for me than >> Bacula since mine is a pretty straight-forward setup. Does that seem >> right? Bacula's been something of a beast for me, especially when I >> had a catalog meltdown and had to restore the catalog piecemeal from >> tape. >> >> I have a number of questions. I'll post some here, and then some in >> followup posts to keep it manageable. Thanks for any help! >> >> 1) I'm curious about how often amanda is updated, approximately. I see >> the current version was released June 2013. How about the previous >> release of 3.x? >> > > Recently, it has been about every 6 months. 3.3.2 was released July > 2012 with 3.3.3 release Jan 2013 followed by 3.3.4 last June/July. > >> 2) Is it clear whether it's better to use the amanda.org mailing lists >> or the forums on zmanda.com? The mailing lists seem significantly >> slower than Bacula's. Is Amanda less widely used? Or maybe that's >> because there are fewer problems with Amanda? :) >> > > Both mailing lists and forums are regularly watched so it is your pick > which you prefer working with. There is a large Amanda users base but I > cannot compare with Bacula and its mailing list. Hopefully it is just > due to less problems in Amanda :-) > >> 3) Are multi-drive tape changers directly supported? If I run amanda >> and multiple clients need backing up, amanda will use both tape drives >> simultaneously? >> > > Yes. If there are multiple objects to back up and Amanda estimates that > it will ultimately need to write all the data to more than 1 tape, it > will load up to this number of tapes into drives and begin writing data > to multiple drives simultaneously. > >> 4) Anyway to find out if my Quantum Scalar I-500 tape library is >> supported? The link on the site regarding supported tape devices is >> dead. It seems Amanda uses low-level tape commands, so it shouldn't be >> an issue? Anything to test it's compatibility? >> > > Amanda depends on the system to correctly recognize the robot and tape > devices and the UNIX mt and mtx commands to work with the tape drives > and robot respectively. If Quantum claims to support the OS you plan to > use as the backup server and this library can be operated with the mt > and mtx command, Amanda should be able to work with the library > correctly. > >> 5) Many links on the FAQ and wiki pages are dead. Is that an ongoing >> issue or just temporary? It doesn't bode too well for the >> documentation. >> > > I am seeing that several of the FAQ links do not appear to be going > where they should be. I did a quick fix on these. I am not immediately > finding such links to be incorrect on wiki in general, however. Feel > free to point out any that I am missing I will look into these. > > Paul >
