Thanks much for your help.
I have to convince my manager that it is essential to priorities backing up
our systems (including budget)
We are planning to perform level 0 backup during the weekend and incremental
backups during the week days.
Brian - it sounds like a similar situation to your system - a cycle of 5
days incremental backup and weekend full backup.
Please note that we have two separated data center so I should also consider
the Bandwidth on the network...

Regarding your question about how many partition do I have to back up - It
is hard to say because I just realized we bought two new servers...

I just want to have a backup - so I can sleep better at night...

Any thoughts about the drive: "EXABYTE 80GB/160GB VXA-2 TAPE DRIVE LCD INT"
? (It cost ~950$ sounds like a good deal)

Finally, we have a window server with free hard drive storage - about
200GB - my manager think that it would be better to backup our data on those
hard drives. Is it feasible to do so with Amanda? and if not recommended,
any good arguments are mostly welcome.

Thanks again and have a great weekend,
Gil



-----Original Message-----
From: owner-amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
[mailto:owner-amanda-users AT amanda DOT org]On Behalf Of Brian Cuttler
Sent: Friday, December 03, 2004 3:35 PM
To: Gil Naveh
Cc: Brian Cuttler; amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
Subject: Re: Recommendation for tape drives



Gil,

I should also ask... how many partitions are being backed up ?
What are the relative sizes of these partitions ?
How often do you hope to backup your data ?
For what period of time would you like to retain the data ?
 ie size of tape pool ?

Amanda wants to schedule a level 0 dump each "dumpcycle".
It will schedule higher level dumps in between the level 0 dumps.

I would "guess" that a DLT drive, even a relatively small DLT 4000
might be enough to backup your data with a pool of 20 days, one/day
across a 5 day "week".

It is what my site did - but I don't think my solution will necessarilly
meet your needs, especially since (I believe) $ 1000 is a little tight
to purchase a DLT and tape pool.

You could use a lower capacity drive, provided it was large enough
to backup the "largest" partition you have - provided someone was
in attendance to manually load the next tape, that is "manual" version
of a jukebox. Recall that amanda is not designed to span a DLE across
multiple output volumes.

On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 02:20:58PM -0500, Gil Naveh wrote:
> Some more specifications regarding getting a tape drive:
> I have a Solaris 9 box which will be the Amanda server
> I have to back up another Solaris box as well as a few Window2000 boxes.
> The budget for the tape drive is about 500$ to 1000$ (without Jukebox -
too
> expensive)
> I would like to use compression, yet I have no idea about the
> compressibility of the data.
>
> My preferences would be: 1) A device that can store 30GB or more. (most
> important)
>                          2) Easy to configure with Amanda.(very
impportant)
>                          3) Reliable (very impportant)
>                          3) Fast to record and recover (less important)
> thx :)
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
> [mailto:owner-amanda-users AT amanda DOT org]On Behalf Of Brian Cuttler
> Sent: Friday, December 03, 2004 1:27 PM
> To: Gil Naveh
> Cc: amanda-users AT amanda DOT org
> Subject: Re: Recommendation for tape drives
>
>
>
> Gil,
>
> Amanda uses native utilities to write the tape drive.
>
> If you tell us your OS we might have specific recommendations.
>
> Do you have any idea the compressability of your data, and if you
> want to use compression or not ? Jukebox ? Budget ?
>
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 12:30:44PM -0500, Gil Naveh wrote:
> >
> > hi,
> >
> > Can someone recommend a tape-drive that works well with Amanda and can
> > backup about 40-60GB.
> >
> > Thx,
> > Gil
> >
> ---
>    Brian R Cuttler                 brian.cuttler AT wadsworth DOT org
>    Computer Systems Support        (v) 518 486-1697
>    Wadsworth Center                (f) 518 473-6384
>    NYS Department of Health        Help Desk 518 473-0773
>
---
   Brian R Cuttler                 brian.cuttler AT wadsworth DOT org
   Computer Systems Support        (v) 518 486-1697
   Wadsworth Center                (f) 518 473-6384
   NYS Department of Health        Help Desk 518 473-0773