[IMPORTANT! This message has been blind-carbon-copied to you.
Do not reply-to-all or forward it without the author's permission.]

with SATA disks becoming cheaper, it becomes very attractive to
use USB2.0 connected disks as backup medium rather than
tapes. The $/MB are almost even these days and are likely to
go in favour of the disks with higher capacities in the future, while
I do not see tape media becoming much cheaper in the long run.

That poses the question, how easy it is to use a disk as backup medium
for AMANDA.

I am envisioning use several disks as follows:

Daily01:        on DISK1
Daily02:        on DISK2
Daily03:        on DISK3
Daily04:        on DISK4
Daily05:        on DISK1
Daily06:        on DISK2
...

This can be accomplished by either partitioning each of these
disks into several partitions with a fixed size each
(to emulate a tape), one for each medium,
or to just create directories and have more flexibility sizewise.

I envision that one could make a chg-script to
link the 'tepdev' device to the correct partition
(eg ln -s /dev/hdd4 /dev/tape  for Daily04).
or similar stuff for directories

What changes would be required to amtape/mt(?)/etc
to support writing to partitions (raw?) or
multiple files ?

Has anyone done something like this?

Mathias