Joe Konecny wrote:

Jon LaBadie wrote:

So... is amanda really not made for disaster recovery?  That's great
that it will back up to a holding disk with no tape but if the hard
drive dies it's rather meaningless.

I don't understand the leap you've made here.
The holding disk is a buffer to allow multiple items to be
backed up simultaneously but with a single stream to tape.

If no "usable" tape is available amanda will still do the
backups but leave them in the buffer (holding disk) for
later taping.  "Usable" here can mean many things including
a tape not part of amanda's collection (do you really want
it to trash someone else's valuable data?), an amanda tape
not permitted to be overwritten (admin controllable), or
even a broken drive or no tape inserted.

How does that imply "not for disaster recovery"?  What would
your current system do if the tape "jammed"?  Would it still
backup?  True, if you encountered a situation where you did
not put in a tape AND the holding disk died you would not
have a backup.  Is that your concern?

BTW some amanda installations use cheaper, separate drives
for the holding disk.  On my primary home office system,
the 4 system drives are scsi.  My holding disk is an IDE
drive bigger than the sum of the scsi drives.  Once I went
on a week long trip forgetting to insert a new set of tapes.
Came home, inserted the tapes and flushed a weeks worth of
normal backups on to several tapes.

It's because of what I am used to...  Right now Arcserve
backs up my Netware server as long as there is a tape in
the drive.  To me that's ideal since the data collection
in our factory runs 24-7.  Even on Sat and Sun when I'm not
there the tape is still over written with the latest data.
If Amanda does only copies the data to a holding area and
we lose a drive on Sunday night I have massive problems.
That's what I call a disaster and I don't see how amanda
can help me there.  I do want to make it work however.

I think that if things are so critical I would seriously
investigate in purchasing a tape changer.