Gene Heskett wrote:

On Tuesday 19 November 2002 03:59, Charles Sprickman wrote:

On Mon, 18 Nov 2002, Martinez, Michael - CSREES/ISTM wrote:

As far as I know, unfortunately there is no way to get around
this dilemma becuase Amanda is not capable of appending tapes.

Ouch...  Any other suggestions or tips to get around this?  Any
other s/w anyone would like to recommend?

Disclaimer:  I've never done it, but I've seen it discussed here.

You might consider using 2 configurations, one that uses a disk file, and one that uses tape, then include the diskfile area in the tape disklist only.

Run the tapeless version 6 days, and run both (tapeless first) with a script on the 7nth. Unforch, if you lose the disk before it gets to tape, its lost, & that is scarey...

Actually, I would recommend trying a slightly more perverse variation:
Two configurations, "withtape" and "notape", identical except for "notape"
has a tapedev=/dev/null, so it backs up only to holding disk.

Each night you:
  mount holding disk read/write
  amdump notape
  mount holding disk read-only
  amlabel withtape -f somename
  amflush withtape
This way you write the full and all the partials to tape every night;
you keep a copy on disk for fast restores, but you have a tape in the
drive with the full and all the partials.  If your tape gets rewound
or hoses up, you redo the flush.  You're still a little bit vulnerable
to a combination disk/tape failure on the backup server, but its
quite a bit safer (in my mind) than appending to tapes.

At the end of the week, do an amflush with the holding disk mounted
read/write, and save the tape.  This clears out your holding disk,
and gives you a tape to keep longer term which has everything you
need to recover any day of that week, just like any other append
scheme.

It might be good to add an option to amflush at some point to not
clean out the holding disk (i.e write the data to tape, but keep the files)
then folks could do this a bit more cleanly than the mount read-only bit.

Marc