On Mon, Feb 14, 2005 at 01:49:53AM -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Sunday 13 February 2005 16:43, Erik P. Olsen wrote:
> >Until recently I had a DDS3 tape streamer. Then it broke down a few
> >weeks ago and I bought a DDS4 tape streamer. I therefore have a lot
> > of DDS3 tapes which I like to use for incremental back-ups because
> > the new tape streamer can also handle DDS3 tapes. I will then ear
> > mark the DDS4 tapes for full back-ups. Is that possible and how can
> > that be accomplished?
> 
> Not with only one config setup.  And with 2, then the one you would 
> like to use for incrementals doesn't know anything about the fulls, 
> so it gets a tummy ache.
> 
...
> 
> I just had an intrigueing idea though.  What if there were two 
> identical config dirs setup, each subdir for the data amanda keeps 
> was lndir'ed to yet a third dir which was then the common dir for all 
> of amanda's data.  The only real files in the two config dirs would 
> be the amanda.conf, and the tapelist.  It seems like a bit of hassle 
> for the initial setup, but could anyone throw a showstopper into this 
> picture?

For a while (about 18-24 months) I was running an archive config similar
to that.  It was only run sporadically, about 10 times total, and I have
only done a few file recoveries.  But they worked.

My objective was separation of the disklists among the two configs.
System files (/, /opt, /var, ...) and user+data files (/home, ...).
Same tape list was used, same index, same curinfo, same logfiles,
...  Main difference was amanda.conf and disklist.  I kept a three
directory structure, archive-sys, archive-user, and archive-common.
IIRC, even the amanda.conf files were the same, though not expecting
that I kept them separate.  Most of the rest that joined them was not
links, but entries in the amanda.conf file, like logdir, curdir, etc.
pointing to the archive-common tree.  tapelist might have been links
as were a few others.

It worked for what I wanted, the ability to archive user or system
files "on demand".  But it is pretty limited experience to hang your
hat on.

-- 
Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
 JG Computing
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