Les Mikesell <lesmikesell at 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). -- Bryan J. Smith | Sent from Yahoo Mail mailto:b.j.smith at ieee.org | (please excuse any http://thebs413.blogspot.com/ | missing headers)