On Thu May 15 2003 10:22, Matt Hyclak wrote:
>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

Most of these sorts of problems can usually be addressed with the 
dumporder option string available in amanda.conf.

I currently have mine set as a string of capital S's.  This makes 
amanda do the largest one first, then each succeeding smaller one 
until its down to the 32k blocks for the level 1's that it can use 
to fill up the tape if they are due.

>From amanda.conf:
-------------------------------------
dumporder "SSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS" 
# specify the priority order of each dumper
                        #   s -> smallest size
                        #   S -> biggest size
                        #   t -> smallest time
                        #   T -> biggest time
                        #   b -> smallest bandwitdh
                        #   B -> biggest bandwitdh
                        # try "BTBTBTBTBTBT" if you are not holding
                        # disk constrained
                        # BUT, if you want streaming, start with the big ones 
and work 
down
-----------------------------------
And mine, once it starts to write, streams non-stop till its done.  
I also have my DLE's adjusted so that no one DLE is more than half 
a tape (hopefully, some have grown since then)

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz  512M
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by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2003 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.