Vijay, 

I really don't think you will have a lot of luck getting this change
committed to CVS. There are some very good reasons why this has been
discussed and discarded several times already: 

- Different tape hardware has different methods (and accuracy) in
positioning for append.

- If the tape fails during an append, you've not only put the current backup
in jepoardy, you've destroyed any other backups that were on that tape. 

- Is your data really worth so little that you won't buy a few more tapes
for it? 

That being said, AMANDA already supports what you're asking for, in a safer
manner. You can perform several backups to holding disk, then flush them all
to the same tape. This avoids the problem of tape positioning, and all of
the backups remain on the holding disk until they are written to tape.

The amanda-users and amanda-hackers archives have other people's takes on
the matter. 

Here's Gyles entry from FOM:
http://amanda.sourceforge.net/cgi-bin/fom?_highlightWords=append%20tape&file
=29


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Vijay [mailto:vijayb AT ooty.tenet.res DOT in]
> Sent: Monday, September 23, 2002 12:46 AM
> To: amanda-hackers AT amanda DOT org; amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
> Subject: help on append to tape feature
> 
> 
> hi group,
>        i'm planning to add "append to tape" feature in 
> amanda. ie.. In case 
> of smaller dump size. amanda needs an unused tape for dump. i 
> would like 
> amanda to dump these smaller tapes in an available tape by 
> appending. so i 
> would like to get help regarding this. i found that this module needs 
> developers. i would like to contribute. i suppose the taper 
> module of amanda 
> needs changes. any help regarding this will be greatly appreciated.
> 
> Vijay
>