Which reminds me...If cost is a factor, now that FILE-DRIVER is an
option, RAID or removable hard drives may give you a better $/GB ratio
than tapes, and much more capacity than CD-R.  I think this is a very
good option for a single computer or small network like Justin described
in his original e-mail.  If you use removable drives or a RAID-1, you
might not need anything else, though it would be a good idea to still
dump more important files to tape or writable DVD media occasionally.  I
haven't investigated it, but I have heard of hot-swap external SATA and
firewire options which would be very good indeed.

250 GB removable drives could be a great option if you are backing up
large partitions, say up to 500 GB uncompressed, so that you could get
around dumps not fitting on a single tape without having to use RAIT
with multiple tape drives, or very expensive tape drives and media, or
split up dumps with (IMHO inefficient and CPU/IO intensive) GNUTAR.

In my case, I am using a 1 TB Snap Server 4500 in a RAID-5 configuration
and flushing mostly just the full dumps to 200/100 GB LTO (Ultrium-1). 
Since RAID-5 has less redundancy than RAID-1, I am more concerned about
having at least some dumps on tape since a 2-disk failure would mean
that all of the data on the RAID-5 would be gone.

On Sun, 2004-05-02 at 20:53, brad AT superconnect DOT net wrote:
> In my Amanda experience, I was lucky enough to have a
> large holding disk area and a tape drive which failed
> spectacularly before even one backup was flushed. It gave
> me the opportunity to see how Amanda works. The most
> wonderful aspect was how happy "she" was to restore
> from the holding disk.

--jonathan