On Thu, Mar 30, 2006 at 09:11:17PM -0500, stan wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 30, 2006 at 05:55:02PM -0600, Salvatore Enrico Indiogine wrote:
> > I am trying to set up an amanda b/u system here at Texas A&M.   This
> > would be the first time for me.
> > 
> > I has been suggested to me to use a daily b/u to disk and then weekly
> > flush to tape.  We have a 8-slot Quantum tape drive.
> > 
> Do you really need teh complexity of doing both virtual tapes, and 
> physical tapes? The only real advantage is in speed of recovery,
> and, if you work at it hard enough, being able to recover, while a
> backup is running.
> 
> Sounds like your hardware is better suited to a "classic" Amanda
> set up to me.

I had a similar thought.  You say your available hard disk space
is not sufficient to hold a full set of level 0 dumps.  I think
you said that was 600GB and you had only 400GB of disk.

In that situation, even if you spread out the dumps with incrementals
and full dumps you could not hold a single dumpcycle's worth of
dumps on the hard disk.  Assuming you had a 7 day dumpcycle, you
might be able to save 3 - 4 days worth of dumps on disk.  And many
incrementals would be of less value because their level 0 starting
points were already deleted.

I suspect you would be better off using that 400GB disk for holding
disk space and saving your dumps to tape.

What capacity is your tape?  I would suggest that when you start your
production configuration you ease into the disklist entries (DLEs).
If you have several hosts, each with several DLEs, enter all the DLEs
into your disklist file, but comment them out with "#"s.  Then before
each days' run of amdump, uncomment one or two DLEs from each host.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
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