Amanda's planning for use of holding disk space

So, after 3 years of pressure and inadequate backups, my one departmentthat never has enough money to do anything has finally bought a tapelibrary. I'm setting it up on the existing server, because they can'tafford the other components to set up an Amanda backup server (eventhough I have a hand-me-down server with no disk drives). I've scroungedspace on a few drives for holding disk space, but there's no symmetry insize, and the smaller ones won't do for the larger DLE's.

So, the question is, if Amanda has more than one holding disk(partition), and they differ in size, will Amanda know when the smallerone is inadequate for a particular DLE and explicitly choose the largerone? Also, if I have specified spindle numbers in my disklist, so thatAmanda will avoid doing parallel dumps from the same spindle, is thereany way of informing Amanda of the spindle numbers for the holding disks(partitions) and taking that into account in the planning?

For this department, at the moment, I don't have the luxery of more thanone dedicated drive for holding disk space. So, given the possiblechance of backing up a DLE to a holding disk partition that is on thesame spindle as the DLE, is it likely to work better just to rearrangespace and coalesce it on one holding disk? My idea had been to sharedisks and trade part of this disk for part of another so that dumpscould be using more than one spindle for holding space.


TIA

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Chris Hoogendyk

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  O__  ---- Systems Administrator
 c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geology Departments
(*) \(*) -- 140 Morrill Science Center

~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst

<hoogendyk AT bio.umass DOT edu>

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Erdös 4