Les Mikesell lesmikesell@gmail.com wrote:
Amanda has done that for at least 15 years now. It's clunky to restore, but they got the backup side right from the beginning. You can tell it how much bandwidth to use on your network(s) and it will stream that much into the holding disk simultaneously from many different hosts, writing to tape in sequence as they are completely received.
Buffering is better than what I normally see.
But ultimately, the disk-to-disk sync, multiple volume storage, and then "export to" (and "import from") tape functionality is what today's VTL offers.
Since it is almost full-auto - I still let amanda run tapes to be held offsite but I really don't ever want to use them except as a last resort,
But what about having Amanda not commit things to tape, and retrieve from the disk backup? Not quite, eh? ;->
hence the offsite backuppc disk.
But not that's an entirely different solution. Wouldn't it be nice if the solution was catered to disk-to-disk, but also let you export/import to/from tape for select backups? ;->
BTW, I've just had a lot of clients send their disks out for data recovery. So I can't condone off-line disk.
Now if you take the disk off-site and put it in another system, that'd different. As long as it is getting periodically exercised, that is good.
My backuppc archive probably has at least a million hardlinks and conventional copy mechanisms take longer than practical.
Hardlinks _can_ be stored in a stream archive format. ;->
Again, I think this is more about the lack of a good, unified open source system of disk-to-disk backup with tape export/import. Too many systems are either disk-only or tape-only (with only disk as buffer in the best case, not multi-volume/multi-backup management).