--On Friday, January 03, 2003 22:18:18 -0500 "John R. Jackson" <jrj AT purdue 
DOT edu> wrote:

>> Is there a reason indexing isn't on by default?  They don't really take up
>> that much space ...
> 
> I beg to differ:
> 
>   $ du -sk /var/amanda/index/champion
>   4641743 /var/amanda/index/champion
>   
> Yup.  Four and a half *GBytes*.
> 
> Now, granted, this is on a very large Amanda configuration.  But it's
> not peanuts even in my "small" configs.

OK, size is a relative thing.  If all you back up is a 9 gig disk
then 4,5 G would be huge, if you are backing up terabytes then it
is just dust.  I would still guess that as a percentage of total
disk backed up it is a relatively small number, unless you have
an unusually high percentage of your disk occupied by tiny files.

>> ... and recovery is an all or nothing deal without them.  ...
> 
> Not at all, although it depends on how things are set up.  Using dump
> (instead of GNU tar) provides a fairly easy to manage shell to pick
> and choose what to restore.  Knowing which tapes are needed might be an
> issue -- it depends on the restore scenerio.

But dump limits you to filesystems smaller than your tape since
Amanda won't span tapes on a single DLE. So those of us that
prefer larger filesystems are forced to use GNU tar, and indexes
make restoring with tar much simpler.

>> Just curious as why some of the defaults are the way they are.
> 
> Ah, now that's a completely different question :-).  The answer, as is
> often the case, is "because it's always been that way".  Changing the
> default could be a *big* surprise to folks who upgrade.

Like suddenly making the existance of a listed exclude file required
in 2.4.3 when it used to be optional?
 
Frank


--
Frank Smith                                                fsmith AT hoovers 
DOT com
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