How do I get off this list?
I used to use Amanda, and I'm grateful for many (!) years of good
service from it, but I finally got tired of changing tapes and
worrying about them, and I didn't want to buy expensive new tape
equipment and even-more-expensive tapes just to keep using Amanda.
(Unlike the current occupants of the White House, I don't depend on
tape recycling to excuse the destruction of evidence of my bad
behaviors.) The modern Amanda solution of using disks as if they were
tapes just doesn't make sense to me. Why pretend that these things
are tapes? So I wrote my own system in Python, and it's now working
well enough that I've turned off Amanda forever. It's not that I
don't like Amanda. I just don't like tapes, or tape drives, and I
don't see why tape-like files are necessary or good. The tape
metaphor seems like a hairball to me, now that disks and Linux
software RAIDs are so cheap and easy. And with my own system, I'm now
free to script all the things that Amanda, with all its complexity and
generality, discouraged me from scripting: the capture of VMware NTFS
flat memory files only when I'm doing a level 0 backup of what's in
them, the use of reverse ssh tunnels to back up our notebooks when
they're away from home, etc. (I began to be serious about building my
own system when I learned on this list that automating the backups of
roving notebooks are problematic for Amanda.) I'm also freer to
integrate the Transparent Archivist
(http://www.flaterco.com/ta/ta.html) with it in an intimate way. Of
course, my approach isn't for everybody. It's not general. It only
works for Unix boxes, and only through ssh. It's really just for my
company, with its peculiar needs and resources, which include a
dedicated web server.
Anyway, I don't think I have anything more to contribute to this list,
or it to me, and so I think it would be good for me to stop receiving
this mail. Unfortunately, it's not obvious how to do that, which is
the reason for this note.
-- Steve
Steven R. Newcomb, Consultant
Coolheads Consulting
Co-editor, Topic Maps International Standard (ISO/IEC 13250)
Co-editor, draft Topic Maps -- Reference Model (ISO/IEC 13250-5)
srn AT coolheads DOT com
http://www.coolheads.com
direct: +1 910 363 4032
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fax: +1 910 454 8461
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Southport, North Carolina 28461 USA
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