Having a copy of the previous dump's index at the beginning of the a
tape, along with a utility that reads the tape and generates an index of
the data currently on it would work fine.

Way back when I owned a 486, I had a tape drive (an Eagle Travan if I
remember correctly) that did that.  Since I only had one machine there
wasn't anywhere else to store the index.  I think that it worked quite
well, and saved me from disaster on a few occasions.


My index directory is currently 107MB.  I do currently copy it to
another computer on-site, but it's a little bit too large to e-mail off
site.  Anyway, another computer on-site works fine only so long as the
disaster I am recovering from isn't building-wide, like a fire or
earthquake.  

I suppose I could write it to CD and take that off-site, but why should
I need both a tape and CD off-site?

I suppose that if I add my index directory to the disklist as it's own
entry (instead of being nested as it is now), I could write a script to
read the tape and generate an index.  I would then know where on the
tape the old indexes are and could pull them off as well.  That
shouldn't be too difficult.

I think that I will give it a shot when I get some spare time.  Gotta
love OSS.  If it doesn't do what you want, change it so it does!


Anthony



On Wed, 2002-09-18 at 15:10, Niall O Broin wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 18, 2002 at 02:29:58PM -0800, Anthony Valentine wrote:
> 
> > Question:  Can Amanda be setup so that it writes a copy of it's indexes
> > to the beginning of each tape?
> > 
> > I realize that I can add the filesystem that holds the indexes to my
> > disklist, but then I won't know where on the tape it is.  If it were
> > always the first thing after the label I could easily find it in an
> > emergency.
> 
> That'd be a nice feature, but then a lot of things about time travel might
> be nice :-) I don't think it can be done in the general case, because taping
> will usually have started before the indices would be updated.
> 
> Of course in the case of an emergency such that you need to get the indices
> from tape, I suppose having on on the last tape a copy of the indices
> correct as to the previous tape would be a whole lot better than nothing.
> 
> What I, and I think many others, do is to copy the indices to a different
> disk after each daily Amanda run which gives you a little insurance against
> a disk crash. As I write this it occurs to me that the indices are not so
> big that it would be unreasonable to also ship them offsite somewhere also,
> presuming that you have access to such a place. You could even simply email
> them to youself at a special account on a non-company mailserver.
> 
> 
> 
> Kindest regards,
> 
> 
> 
> Niall  O Broin
-- 
UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that
would also stop you from doing clever things.