On Tuesday 24 January 2006 08:44, Graeme Humphries wrote:
>Ian Turner wrote:
>>The good news is that we are working on native optical media support.
>> No promises about a release date, but it will be available at some
>> point.
>
>I am *so* happy to hear that. I need a real backup solution for my
> home server, but I can't personally afford a nice tape changer. ;)
>
>Graeme

Neither can I, Graeme.  So, since big hard drives are almost commodity 
items now, I'd get one big (200GB?) enough, install it on the 2nd cable 
as slave, eg /dev/hdd, and partition it into 3 pieces.  A swap of a 
couple of gigs, a /var of perhaps 10GB and the rest as /amandatapes or 
whatever and setup 15 or so virtual tapes on it, and use the FILE: 
device.

The swap and /var need to go off the main drive anyway, swap for 
performance if its used (rarely here) and /var in case something takes 
the main drive read-only, you still have logs to diagnose the problem 
with.

Thats what I did, writing some script snippets to do the initial setup 
that I could fiddle with, running a config for perhaps a week to get a 
feel for how much space it would need over the long haul, finally 
settling of a vtape size of about 8GB, with 20 vtapes & a 4 day 
dumpcycle.  After 18 months the utilization according to df seems to 
have stabilized in the mid 80% range, so I haven't adjusted anything in 
quite a while now.

In the grand scheme of things, this is a one time per hd failure 
expense, whereas using re-recordable dvd's still needs to have spares 
for the disk failures which seems to be in the 10% per re-write range, 
plus the average life of a burner seems to be somewhere in the 300-500 
disks burnt range.   The only advantage I can see to dvd's is that its 
possible to do offsite storage.  If thats important (its not to me, I'm 
not commercial, just a retired old f--t home user on SS)

My only expense so far was the drive itself.  And its worked literally 
10 times or more dependably that my previous tape changer setups ever 
did.  The usual errors logged have to do with backing up the dirs where 
the mail files live as all that also runs 24/7 here.  So they are of 
course a never mind (file changed while being read) error.

YMMV of course.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
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