Jon LaBadie on Thu 23/01 02:34 -0500:
> >    - amanda can't do hardware compression without breaking easily
> 
> False.  Many use hardware compression very happily.  The issue is that
> DLE's vary greatly in their compressibility.  Some of mine compress to
> 20% of their original size, others to 95%.  For some tasks, amanda
> would like to know how much tape a backup is going to use.  If she
> doesn't compress it, she doesn't know for sure.  But she certainly
> does not break.

ok "for some tasks" like what? If it doesn't break I'll probably opt for
hardware compression, since that is a really big win for my particular
site, and if I am using RAIT I get 4 ASICs working on it rather than one
slow CPU :)

> >    - amanda doesn't do parallel backups under any circumstances
> 
> Not sure what you are looking for in parallelism.  Certainly amanda
> can simultaneously backup multiple DLE's from a single or multiple
> clients.  Amanda can't run multiple configurations (say a daily and a
> monthly config) at the same time.

I mean multiple drives.  Looks like RAIT is the answer here.  This
feature is apparently backed out of the 2.4p2 RPM I have from Redhat
8.0; the ChangeLog note says "instead, in 2.5 and in 2.4 multitape" so
this is why I did not come across it before.

> I'm not familiar with using multiple drives.  However amanda did
> introduce a RAIT capability last year.  It is my understanding that
> this can be used for mirroring, striping, ???  I'm sure others will
> answer.

Yep, looking into this now.  Will probably post some more questions as I
become familiar with it.  I already like the idea of allowing for a
failed tape quite a bit.

Amanda sure is a lot different than Legato Networker, which I am
switching from :) But since we could probably pay enough full time
workers to record all the bits needing backup onto a paper with a
pencil, for less than it costs to keep Legato, I think I'll not mind a
few setbacks on the way :)