On Fri, Sep 20, 2002 at 09:19:43PM -0400, Gene Heskett wrote:

> seen it work in practice here, nor do I need it, but my system is 
> only 46gigs, which amanda cheerfully uses about half a 4gig tape 
> per nightly run to back it all up on a 1 week dumpcycle.

Gene - I've seen you mention this a few times before and I'm mildly curious.
You've a 1 week dumpcycle, and I'll assume runspercycle is 7. You said that
amanda uses about half a 4gig tape per nightly run which is 14 gig in a
week. Now even assuming that you have miniscule level 1 dumps, are you
getting such good compression from gzip that you get 46G (at least) of disk
into 14G of tape ? Or is the 46G the amount of disk space you're backing,
but it's not actually all used ? Mind you, I have to say that I have been
very impressed with the usage amanda makes of tape - I'd say that this is
one of its best features, esp. now that the cost of disk storage is now only
about the same as the cost of tape to back it up.

> of the DDS2 is the price of the tapes, they are almost a non-issue 
> at less than 50 bucks a ten pack on ebay.

Even so - $5 per 4G tape is $1.25 a tape, which is > IDE disk costs now, and
this price per gig doesn't seem to vary hugely as you go to bigger
capacities. I think I paid about 9 EURO (a few cents less than $9 at
current rates) the last time I bought DDS 3 tapes (12 G). DDS4 (20 GB) cost
18 EUR, 40 GB DLT is 63 EURO, 60 GB ADR is 60 EUR. Bottom line is tape has
become relatively expensive, and amanda can get very good mileage (byteage
?) from your tapes.



Regards,



Niall  O Broin