On Fri, Dec 9, 2011 at 12:11 PM, Devin Reade <gdr at gno.org> wrote: > --On Friday, December 09, 2011 11:48:49 AM -0600 Les Mikesell > <lesmikesell at gmail.com> wrote: > >> Errr, what? Amanda is a little cumbersome to set up, but it doesn't >> bite. If gnutar works, amanda should work or tell you why. > > As I said, it's been at least 8 years since I dealt with Amanda. > Going by memory, though, in the case of Amanda, it wasn't flakiness > but rather limitations. > > At the time Amanda had the limitation that the backup of a filesystem > could not span tapes. This was a critical issue in that I had > filesystems larger than the largest tapes available. In the case > where filesystem sizes approached the size of a tape, it wasted a > lot of tape space (which wasn't cheap). The brilliant thing about amanda, going back more than a decade, is that it knows how to estimate the size of backups and if you give it many filesystems to back up, it will skew a mix of full and incremental runs to fit the tape efficiently, getting at least an incremental every day and as many fulls as will fit. Of course you will cause problems if you put more data than will fit on your tape on a single filesystem, though. > I'm willing to believe that they've fixed that limitation, but > if so I'd already moved on. I think they have, but I just let my old system run until the tape drive died and by than was more than satisfied with backuppc, using a raid-mirroring scheme to make offsite copies (soon to be replaced independently running offsite servers). I'll be happy if I never see a tape again. --- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com