First nit: the subscription greeting for this mailing list said the archives
were at "ftp://ftp.amanda.org/pub/amanda/maillist-archives"; but they are not
there.  I could not find any elsewhere.  So I cannot look at past messages
to see if my question is answered.  It was not answered in the FAQ.

What I would like to know is how Amanda handles backup to disk.  I did find
a "file driver".  I'm not sure if that is meant to be the "to disk" method
or not.  It certainly would have some complications, depending on how one
considered disks as equivalent to tapes.

Suppose I have 360 GB to backup.  A 400 GB tape drive is quite expensive.
But a 400 GB hard drive is not.  These days, the price of a 400 GB tape
drive (plus several blank tapes) would buy several 400 GB hard drives in
external cases attached via USB, Firewire, or eSATA.

The complication would be the steps involved in handling a disk.  I would
consider plugging the disk in (USB, Firewire, or eSATA) to be the rough
equivalent of inserting a tape into a manual tape drive.  The question is
what will AMANDA do with a disk that has merely been plugged in.  Can it
be configured to, or does it just understand that it needs to, mount the
disk?  What if the disk is new and not yet formatted?

What it seems this "file driver" probably does not do, which a "disk driver"
(if such a thing exists) could do, is handle the disk as a raw device.  It
could create a partition to be the equivalent of a tape file, and write the
dump/tar image directory to the partition sectors.  When done (or when it
knows exactly how many sectors there will be), it could update the partition
table to represent the exact size.  The next "tape file" could be written
after it and a partition table entry added for that partition/file.

But I don't see any such "disk driver".  And I overlooking something, or is
the "file driver" the only means?  If the latter is true, will AMANDA know
to mount attached disks as filesystems to access the "tape files"?

-- 
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| Phil Howard KA9WGN       | http://linuxhomepage.com/      http://ham.org/ |
| (first name) at ipal.net | http://phil.ipal.org/   http://ka9wgn.ham.org/ |
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