Hi folks,
I've got a bit of a different scenario than I imagine most, and have spent the last 60 or 90 minutes searching Amanda list archives and googling, but did not come up with anything much. Then I went browsing around the Amanda website and found "vaulting" and was wondering whether this would suit my needs.
I'm basically searching around for a backup solution and trying to decide whether to use something off the shelf or just roll my own with gtar. It is important to me that my solution use standard tools like dump/restore / gtar on the back end, which is how I ended up at Amanda. In looking through some of the initial configuration how-tos it seemed as though this was massively over-complex for my application. But then I hit upon "vaulting"
http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/How_To:Copy_Data_from_Volume_to_Volume
This is not exactly my scenario, but maybe there is another way to roll a "vaulting" solution to suit me.
Basically I work in a scientific research lab (stem cell research) where the scientists produce a fair bit of raw data. We want to periodically take the data and archive it to tape and then remove it from disk and store the tape in our archival facility. We'd need a record of what is on each tape of course. But this would not be the same scenario as in the link above because it would not be taking data from 2ndary to tertiary storage. It would essentially be taken from primary to tertiary directly. i.e. directly from disk to tape. But not in an automated fashion like typical nightly dumps. On request, we'd take the scientist's data and copy it over to our server that has the tape unit, then dump it out to tape, and remove it from the disk there. Once verified, we could tell the scientist it is OK to remove their primary data now, and then we'd store the tape.
Is Amanda suited to this? Or is there another application I should be looking at?
thanks, -Alan