Hi folks,

I have an ONStor NAS (Bobcat) with about 5.5TB of usable space
(currently we're at 4.6 used).  I'm looking for suggestions on how to
back this up efficiently with AMANDA.

We've been using AMANDA for forever, but the time to back up this data
is growing and we're trying to figure out how to keep the times down.

We have the data currently split up into 19 different DLEs and each
are backed up using GNU tar.  We've been backing them up sequentially
(i.e. all on the same spindle) under the assumption that, since it's a
RAID 5 set, trying to do them in parallel is just going to thrash all
the disks.  Is this reasonable?  Or should we be able to back these up
in parallel.

Another thought was to have multiple backup clients for the NAS where
each client would be responsible for backing up some subset of the 19
DLEs.  The thought here was to distribute the compute power around
rather than having just one client responsible for everything.

There is talk about going away from AMANDA for this one server to
something which supports NDMP and can dump directly to our LTO3 drive
as well, but that will cost in time, money, and training.  If there's
a way to continue doing this with AMANDA, we'd like to pursue that
route.

Any help or guidance in this area would be appreciated.

-- 
Thanks,
Paul