On Thu, May 15, 2003 at 10:10:15AM -0400, Jon LaBadie enlightened us:

> > The situation would be much better if (maybe only some) DLE's would
> > be split across tapes, like suggested in a mail recently by Brian Cutler.
> > In this case you would only lose the last chunk that has to repeated
> > on the next tape.  This lets you control your wasted tape and time,
> > by tuning your chunksize.
> 
> Letting a DLE split across multiple tapes (no need to limit it to 2)
> has long been a desired feature in amanda.  I suspect that some potential
> users have chosen other software specifically because amanda lacked the
> ability to use multiple tapes for a single DLE.  It would certainly
> address the situation we are currently discussing.
> 
> I wonder if taperalgo would still be a needed/useful/needed feature if
> writing DLE's to tape in chunks were implemented.
> 
> Implementing the ability to split a DLE across multiple tapes would
> continue a trend away from a feature of amanda that attracted me;
> the ability to recover a dump using standard, non-amanda tools.
> The RAIT driver was the first salvo to degrade this feature.
>

I agree with the statement about RAIT, but if amanda were spreading chunks
accross tapes, how would that lose the ability to restore with standard
tools? All you need to do is dd the n chunks off the tape, concatenate them
together, and you have a complete {dump,tar,etc.} archive waiting to go, no?
I think that would be extremely useful, and not turn so many people away
from such a great program....

Matt

-- 
Matt Hyclak
Department of Mathematics
Ohio University
(740) 593-1263

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