<snip>

> >I thought Amanda got dump images from clients in parallel, and put  
> >them on the holding disk, and _then_ wrote these out to the 
> tape,  one 
> >at a time...
> 
> It does exactly that, unless there is no holding disk at all.  But 
> in doing so, then tar has lost the ability to track whats been sent 
> to the tape, and therefore has no idea of how many bytes have been 
> sent to the media.  Ditto for dump.

Ah, of course... bit what about the actual program it uses to write to
tapes? Is it dd, something else, or does it do its own writing?

<snip>

> Better yet, when you have it setup and running, simply box up the 
> last "dumpcycle" tapes and take them to secure storage on say 
> Monday's, bringing in the ones taken offsite the week before. 
> With 3 dumpcycles worth of tapes in the pool, you could leave 2 sets 
> of them offsite, a highly desirable condition, particularly if 
> there are 2 different offsite storage locations available.

True... True...

> This simplify's amanda's record-keeping immensely, and doesn't 
> require two seperate configurations, nor for you to recall exactly 
> what was where in which config.  That can and will be (Murphy is 
> alive and well, thank you, I ran into him just yesterday morning), 
> a major PITA, only discovered when its too late.

True...

> Hopefully, unless the accountant is really trying to cover his 
> tracks, all 3 locations won't burn simultainiously.  OTOH, the 
> accountant should NOT have accurate, uptodate knowledge of the 
> offsite location(s) ever.  Thats just plain good CMA sense.  A 
> little paranoia is a Good Thing(tm). :)  FWIW, I've seen several 
> examples of that failure in my 68 years.

Mmmm... true...

Thing is, my users have this annoying habit of wanting something
restored from three weeks ago... Which complicates issues further, as I
need to have onsite backups for about a month, but would like to have
offsites less than a week old...

rr

-- 
Richard Russell
Yellow Goanna P/L
m: +61 412 827 805
e: richard AT yellowgoanna DOT com
w: http://www.yellowgoanna.com