On Fri, 30 May 2003 at 1:47pm, Brian Cuttler wrote

> I have an IRIX system (Origin 300, 4 500Mhz processors) with a
> few disks on it. One of these disks is relatively large, a RAID
> array configured as a single partition of 0.866 TBytes.

Pah.  I've got a 2TB partition, a 1TB, and a .5TB, with another 2TB on the 
way.  I win.  ;)

> The system owner is thinking of purchasing a jukebox with 8 or 16 bays
> and an SDLT 320 drive, native 160 GByte capacity.

I've got a 19 slot Overland with AIT3 (100GB native).

> I'm thinking Amanda using DLE's specifying TAR (some version of tar)
> backing up perhaps by user directory (which are at the top level of
> the partition).

Until a user gets too big, at which point you need to start playing with 
exclude and include.

> Tar backups would allow for full vs incremental ? And relatively easy
> restores ? I know I could probably xfsdump to multiple tapes but the
> restore process would be a real nightmare.

Yep -- works just fine here.  If you use amrecover, you won't even be able 
to tell if you're using dump or tar.  Using amrestore, just remember to do 
'tar x' rather than xfsrestore.

> We are open to suggestions, hardware, software or otherwise.

I use software compression so I can turn it on or off as befits each 
user's data.  Some stuff compresses *very* well (one user has 360GB on 
disk, which compresses down to <60GB using gzip --fast), and other stuff 
is incompressible, even in software.

I don't do too much Irix, so I don't know how you'd control the changer.  
I use mtx on Linux, with the chg-zd-mtx changer.  My library (Overland 
Library Pro) is solid, and was a very good deal compared with other AIT 
changers.

Good luck.

-- 
Joshua Baker-LePain
Department of Biomedical Engineering
Duke University