Gil,

Amanda is designed to attempt to load average data across the week.
You can coerce it into a weekend full but it isn't the normal method
of operations. This will require a large enough single volume to 
backup all partitions at level 0, rather than distrubuting level 0, 1, 2,
across 5 volumes.

I've only heard good things about the VXA drives but have no personal
experience.

Yes, amanda can backup to "virtual tapes" on disk - but that doesn't
really protect you from fire/flood. One of the guys where I work likes
to ask "How big an asteroid are you expecting ?" What level of disaster
do you need (mandated ?) to be ready to recover from ? This may be a
perfectly reasonable thing to do at your site, or it may not.

How many/much of the amanda docs/howto files have you read though ?

                                                Brian


On Fri, Dec 03, 2004 at 04:21:12PM -0500, Gil Naveh wrote:
> 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
>