amanda, large dumps, and HSM

Hello Amanda users,

I'm trying to find out if amanda can meet our needs.

I've heard from many people, "yeah, amanda is really great... except forthat whole doesnt-span-tapes thing".


Right now, we have a Hierachical Storage Management tool

(HSM), and a buncha custom hacked perl scripts, to do our nightlybackups. It's really ugly, and I'd like to completely do away with itfor some thing more uniform.

Ideally, I'd like to do away with the HSM stuff entirely, but I can livewith it if we have to.


For those people unfamiliar with what I mean:

We have a virtual filesystem. People can dump files on the filesystem.Those files transparently get pushed off to tape, asynchronously.

We are using file naming games like [somewhat abstracted here]

/backups/$HOSTNAME/thisweek.dump
/backups/$HOSTNAME/thismonth.dump

The good news is, we have a few 200G tape drives.
The bad news is, we have a few people who want to do 400G backups :-/
[oh, and we have around 300 hosts that need backup on a nightly basis.


So anyway.... are people using amanda like this, on a large scale?

Can anyone share experiences, and hopefully, detailed configurations?