Woops, a couple more things I'd meant to say...

On Tue, Nov 30, 2004 at 01:24:49PM -0500, Brian Cuttler wrote:
> I really should have another spindle, ideally as large
> as the total usage of the top 2 users on /usr5 - however that is about
> 300 Gig.

If your Amanda server does (or can be made to do) IDE, 300 GB
isn't a lot of money these days.  Even if you insist on SCSI for
everything else, it can make sense to use older/cheaper/
less-reliable/otherwise-undesirable drives as Amanda holding
disks.  After all, it's not your real data storage, it's only (as
you said yourself :-) a spool area.  If the disk dies completely,
the most you've lost is one night's backup; your data's all still
safe on the RAID array.

One or two people here have said they take great joy in recycling
old taken-out-of-service drives as Amanda holding disks.

> Also, having a holding area on the same "partition" as the file structure
> being saved has got to be a questionable move, raid based or not.

For performance reasons, of course, it's way better to give the
holding disk its own spindle(s), but if you can't...

What you've said is definitely true for partitions that are
backed up with UFSish dump programs.  But then, you said
[ex]fsdump, didn't you?  I don't know; maybe that (whichever it
is) gets along better with actively changing partitions than UFS
dumps.

For partitions backed up with gtar, I'm not sure, but I suspect
it's only important to make sure the holding area isn't included
in any of the DLEs.  If it isn't, it probably doesn't much matter
whether it's on the same partition or not (except for
performance, as noted above).

--

|  | /\
|-_|/  >   Eric Siegerman, Toronto, Ont.        erics AT telepres DOT com
|  |  /
The animal that coils in a circle is the serpent; that's why so
many cults and myths of the serpent exist, because it's hard to
represent the return of the sun by the coiling of a hippopotamus.
        - Umberto Eco, "Foucault's Pendulum"