On Wed, 2 Feb 2005, Mike Delaney wrote:
> On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 10:43:50AM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> > On Wednesday 02 February 2005 04:12, Mike Delaney wrote:
> > [...]
> > >> >Has anyone used a REV drive with Amanda?
> > >>
> > >> I can imagine that it may be possible, with some variation of the
> > >> FILE: device, and as Jon mentioned, they have a 10 disk changer
> > >> available which to me, would make it *much* more appealing given a
> > >> reasonable price for both the drive and the media..
> > >
> > >Single drives retail for ~ $350 - $450 depending on type (internal
> > > IDE, external USB, etc.).  Media lists for ~ $50 ea.  The
> > > autoloader appears to list for ~ $2200.  So the hardware is a bit
> > > cheaper than a (new) comparable capacity tape unit, but the media
> > > is more expensive.
> > 
> > Humm, thats not too bad, although the $ for the changer would scare 
> > this SS recipient off I'm afraid.  As would a fifty per disk when the 
> > tapelist gets up towards 20 or so.  OTOH, with that 36GB capacity, I 
> > could do a dumpcycle of 2 days here, so I'd only need 4 or 5.
> 
> Yeah, running a traditonal Amanda setup with that kind of media cost
> gets a bit pricey.  One thing you could do with them, since they're
> random access media, is to setup a chg-disk library of several smaller
> vtapes on each, and treat the REV disks as magazines.

Which brings us again to the multi-level vtape backup problem: you have some
(recent) vtapes on the local disk, and others on removable disks.

Could this be modelled as a multi-level changer? I.e. your single virtual tape
drive is mounted in a changer, which has access to all vtapes on the local disk
(through chg-disk). To access other vtapes, the correct removable disk has to
be mounted.

Given the current price/space ratio for (expensive) tape drives and (cheap)
removable (USB/IEEE1394/REV) disks, vtapes sound like the most suitable
solution for people with a limited budget.

Gr{oetje,eeting}s,

                                                Geert

--
Geert Uytterhoeven -- There's lots of Linux beyond ia32 -- geert AT linux-m68k 
DOT org

In personal conversations with technical people, I call myself a hacker. But
when I'm talking to journalists I just say "programmer" or something like that.
                                                            -- Linus Torvalds