> On Tue, May 16, 2006 at 09:53:13AM -0500, Gordon J. Mills III wrote:
> >  here are some of my comments about TSM
> 
> Thanks Gordon.  Tivoli sounds like an interesting enterprise system.
> 
> "incremental forever" is a feature I've heard of in some 
> other backup systems.  I wouldn't expect that to fit the mold 
> of amanda as recovery would then truly demand amanda software 
> and indexes to be present.
> 
> One feature you describe I would like to see added to amanda.
> It really is not a change to the operation, but a new utility.
> That is copying all or portions of a set of backups to new 
> "tapes" or a new config.  With many people doing amanda 
> backups to vtapes, it would be nice to be able to archive 
> desired parts to "offsite" ptapes.
> 
> -- 
> Jon H. LaBadie                  jon AT jgcomp DOT com
>  JG Computing
>  4455 Province Line Road        (609) 252-0159
>  Princeton, NJ  08540-4322      (609) 683-7220 (fax)
>

It is true that the "incremental forever" brings up other issues. I think a
discussion of some of the features/differences between Amanda and TSM may
bring out some additional feature requests to improve Amanda. 

The Inc Forever method does demand a lot more overhead, not to mention the
ability to append to tapes. I guess it doesn't "need" that, but it sure cuts
down on the number of tapes required in the library.

I think if you look at a "traditional" backup scheme vs TSM, Amanda falls
somewhere in the middle. It is a very nice approach. I guess if I had 80
tapes with a 7 or 10 day dumpcycle I would have a lot of versions of files
to choose from :-).

I think that one of the things I liked the most about TSM was the saving of
multiple versions of a file and being able to choose which one I wanted. In
a way it had a lot to do with the way the recovery interface was done. This
can sort of be done in Amanda now, but would be better if the amrecover
interface listed the versions and dates available.

The more I think about it, the more I think Amanda can come closer to
achieving this simply by having a lot of tapes (which would be necessary
anyway for the TSM approach).

As you pointed out, the offsite feature would also be a nice addition. All
of this stuff works best with a tape library that has more than 1 drive, so
I suspect it only applies to a small percentage of Amanda users. The offsite
feature would require a database to keep track of what is offsite and what
is not. What new files need to be written to a tape to go offsite and what
tape(s) need to come back, etc.

Probably most important to me though would be the ability to handle Windows
backups better. I know that it is not necessarily Amanda's fault, but the
file permissions (ACLs) cannot currently be backed up with Amanda. Also, it
does not allow exclude lists for windows clients. This should be possible
since now smbclient has this feature.

Regards,
Gordon