Amanda doesn't use tar to write to the tape directly, so the ability of
tar or star to span tapes or not isn't the issue. Amanda makes a dump
image, which has a header followed by what ever backup format was used
on the client OS. Then the image is then written out to tape, even if
you are backing up direct to tape through amanda. Besides, I swear that
I can remember doing tar to multiple floppies with regular old GNU tar
by specifying a volume size and "multiple" flag or something like that.
The issue with amanda is whether or not you can span the dump images
across multiple tapes. I thought there had been some progress in that
area, or at least some possible hacks using FILE-DRIVER or something,
though it still might not be completely straightforward.
In freshmeat.net the other day I think I noticed there were some other
GUI front-ends to amanda out there, but I have not checked them out.
Also, Red Hat is including, and supposedly supporting, amanda on Red Hat
Enterprise, and may have made some advances in the configuration area.
I think a lot of GUI for backups tend to be a bit clunky and mask a
little too much of what they are actually doing in the background, but
then I am still a bit of a console cowboy. Windows in general can drive
me crazy that way sometimes, when something is "broken" and there is no
easy, free way to get in and see exactly where it is choking except for
some cryptic, stupid error code. Not having a GUI also weeds out some
of the people who don't have a clue from trying to use amanda :-)
In the Windows department, I'm looking into using either built-in backup
of XP Pro, or free software that came with my Snap for backing up
Windows, and then use amanda to backup the Windows stuff off the Snap in
the (hopefully rare) event of a 2-drive failure on the RAID-5.
On Thu, 2004-04-08 at 15:35, Galen Johnson wrote:
> Does/can amanda utilize star? This would be one of the most useful
> capabilities I can foresee for Amanda (quiet Windows users).
--
Jonathan Dill <jfdill AT jfdill DOT com>
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