[CentOS] slow usb hard disk performance.

Tue Dec 6 14:53:26 UTC 2005
Bowie Bailey <Bowie_Bailey at BUC.com>

From: Les Mikesell [mailto:lesmikesell at gmail.com]
> 
> On Mon, 2005-12-05 at 16:11, Bryan J. Smith wrote:
> > Joshua Baker-LePain <jlb17 at duke.edu> wrote:
> > > 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