Use of tape changers?

Greetings. We've been happily running Amanda on a number of differentsystems around here for several years. Up to this point, we've always useda single tape drive (usually high-capacity) on each tape server. Now we'regetting to the point where disk capacity is exploding. Tape capacity isincreasing as well, of course, but it appears that we'll soon be in asituation where one large tape drive will be inadequate. Maybe we're therealready.

This has lead us to consider alternatives to our somewhat simple-mindedapproach to backups. One alternative would be to make finer subdivisionsof the file systems that we back up (with GNU tar). I.e., instead ofbacking up simply:


        /home

we might put separate entries in the disklist file for:

        /home/annie
        /home/bob
        .
        .
        .
        /home/zelda

or whatever. That seems mildly tedious and probably would cause us atleast to have to modify our number of tapes per cycle, buy additionaltapes, etc.

Another thought we had was to throw additional money at the problem and buysome kind of tape changer. But I have what seems to me to be a fundamentalquestion about changers that I don't see answered in the FAQ's or .../docs,etc. I.e., if we have some kind of a tape changer, does it allow us toexceed Amanda's one-tape-per-session limit? Can we make a single "virtual"tape out of multiple tapes in the changer? Or is it the function of thetape changer simply to let Amanda run unattended for as many sessions asthere are tapes in the changer, but still using only one tape per session?


Thanks.

                                        - Mike

==========
Michael Hannon            mailto:hannon AT physics.ucdavis DOT edu
Dept. of Physics          530.752.4966
University of California  530.752.4717 FAX
Davis, CA 95616-8677