From: Les Mikesell [mailto:lesmikesell@gmail.com]

On Mon, 2005-12-05 at 16:11, Bryan J. Smith wrote:

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Joshua Baker-LePain jlb17@duke.edu wrote:

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Amanda can easily be run in a backup-to-disk-only mode. And it'd be trivial to manually tape some of those images for off-site storage. Doing that within amanda (i.e. backup-to-tape while also leaving images on disk) is a feature folks have talked about.

Excellent!

The question is how seemless is it? Can they stream out their images into a tape archive? It should be possible.

The tricky part is that amanda mixes up the filesystems on tape in no particular order and keeps an index online to tell you which tape(s) to insert when restoring. When it flushes the disk copy out it adjusts the index for the new location so without a patch it won't use the disk copy even if you saved one. There is a tool for rebuilding the index from the tape if necessary and you can figure it out by hand as a last resort but I don't think there is one to look at the holding disk again.

I just dropped in on this thread about Amanda. I'm currently looking for a backup to disk solution for a new system and am curious how well Amanda would work. I've got a large raid partition that I want to backup onto a removable hard drive. The tricky part is that the filesystem is made up of over a million tiny (2-3k) files. Would Amanda be able to deal with that type of filesystem?

Thanks, Bowie