On Wednesday 15 November 2006 10:16, René Kanters wrote:
>Hi Gene,
>
>Sorry about not hitting reply-all. I will from now on!
>
>So are there instructions regarding the best way to set up amanda to
>do backups to a disk as opposed to tape?
>I found the sample for using the test environment with virtual tapes
>at http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Test_environment_with_virtual_tapes
>
>I took out the holdingdisk part of that amanda.conf since I assumed
>that since I am writing directly (and only) to a disk, that would not
>be needed, but your comment suggests that that may not be the proper
>way to think about it.
>
>By the way, where can I look at the mailing list archives to try to
>find my answers there?
>
>Cheers,
>René

Humm, not sure.  I'm pretty sure there is an archive though, look around 
on www.amanda.org.  I finally had to put my own local mbox on a diet, so 
I only go back about 3 years & thats only for stuff marked important in 
kmail.  kmail begins to get pretty sluggish if the corpus of email it has 
to handle goes above the 100,000 mark.  Obviously this is not the only 
list I'm on. :-)

WRT the holding disk, I believe its use will reduce fragmentation of the 
main vtapes partition considerably.  With roughly 160GB of that disk 
being erased and re-written every 3 weeks, the fragmentation is staying 
under 5% or so, and if my boot partition is any indicator, without the 
holding disk's use I suspect it would be in the 50% range after the 
nearly 2 years I've been running that way.

As to whether or not this is a desirable factor, it may not be since the 
number of recoveries is quite small and finding the data will take 
several times longer than recovering it once its found.  So at the end of 
the day it may well be a shrug.

BTW, I use some wrapper scripts I wrote that are available at the zmanda 
site, which make sure that each (v)tape contains its own uptodate index 
data as well as the amanda configuration that made it.  Called 
Genes-Amanda-Helpers or some such.  They give me more piece of mind 
because each (v)tape doesn't have to fwd reference the next one in order 
to have (hopefully, I've been bit by file locks) complete indexes.  
Backwards references for partials work as usual of course when using the 
recovery tools.

[...]

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
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Copyright 2006 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.