On Sunday 17 November 2002 22:51, Charles Sprickman wrote:

> getting worried.  It seems that amanda wants a new tape every day if I'm
> doing daily backups.  This presents a problem.  I have a single 70GB
> drive, no changer, and the systems being backed up are at a remote
> location.  At most I can have someone there once a week to change tapes.
>
> Capacity is not a problem; there will be less than a few hundred MB of
> change per day, and an initial full dump of all 11 machines should come in
> under 5-10GB.  So the tape doesn't "need" to be changed out because it's
> getting full...

There is no way of getting amanda to append a backup onto a tape which already 
contains one - the first thing she does with a tape without exception is 
rewind it.

What you CAN do, however, is use a holding disk large enough to hold all your 
backups for the week - shouldn't be a problem given the sizes you've 
mentioned. Each week when you have the tape changed, you make sure that 
amanda WON'T use the new tape by e.g. zeroing out the start of it. Then when 
the last backup for the week is done, you amlabel the tape (with the -f flag 
to force labelling, because you'll be using an existing tape's name) and then 
do amflush.

Downsides are that you'll have to do a little (very little though) tracking of 
what tape you need (you can read this from the tapelist, or avoid it 
altogether by saving the label block from the tape with dd before zeroing it, 
and then using dd to put it back) and more important, from a backup POV, you 
have a week's exposure to risk of data loss if a disk being backed up AND the 
holding disk both fail in the same week. If the disks are from IBM and of a 
certain vintage, this is a distinct possibility :-(



Regards,



Niall   O Broin