On Wed, Aug 08, 2007 at 11:11:47AM -0400, Jean-Francois Malouin wrote:
> > The original question was the same, and the answer was that you can do
> > that with RAIT with the third (parity) drive set to /dev/null, although
> > that has certain disadvantages, too.
> 
> Don't want to hijack the thread but...
> I've been considering implementing that on my local setup.
> Can you give more details on what are the drawbacks?

The data is striped over two tapes, so if either tape fails, you lose
all of your data. Furthermore, the files on tape aren't just
dumpfiles-with-headers anymore -- you have to use a similarly configured
Amanda to recover your data.  In particular, if one of your tape drives
dies, you won't be able to[1] reassemble any of the dumps on striped
tapes.

All in all, none of these are showstoppers, but they're worth
considering.

Dustin

[1] not easily, anyway.

-- 
        Dustin J. Mitchell
        Storage Software Engineer, Zmanda, Inc.
        http://www.zmanda.com/