On Wed, Jun 02, 2004 at 10:43:01AM -0600, Glenn English wrote:
> I know I could do amdumps and then amflushes at 3:00 AM, but if I could
> get Amanda to wait for all the dumps to come in before writing to tape,
> I think things would be OK.

That's pretty much what we do for our weekly level-0's-to-tape
backups.  We simply avoid inserting a tape on Friday night, which
is when that configuration runs.  Amdump goes into degraded mode;
I set "reserve 0" to keep that from being a problem.  Then on
Monday morning, we mount a tape and run amflush.

(I have different reasons for wanting to do this, but that's
beside the point.)

I don't believe there's a way to get Amanda to do things that way
on its own.

> I wouldn't mind dedicating an IDE drive as
> the holdingdisk, but I'd hate to have to buy a 60GB SCSI for that.

So throw in an IDE disk.  The drive's cheap; the adapter's cheap,
if not free; it's basically expendable -- the most you'd lose is
one night's backups.  You only need one drive, so IDE bus
contention isn't an issue.  As far as I can see, the
disadvantages of IDE are pretty much irrelevent to an Amanda
holding disk on an otherwise-SCSI system -- or, for that matter,
to the only disk on a dedicated Amanda server like ours.  The
only exception I can think of is raw platter RPMs; I don't know
whether that'd make the difference between keeping your DLT
streaming and not (with our lowly DDS3, it's not exactly an issue
:-/)

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics AT telepres DOT com
|  |  /
It must be said that they would have sounded better if the singer
wouldn't throw his fellow band members to the ground and toss the
drum kit around during songs.
        - Patrick Lenneau