On Wed, Feb 1, 2012 at 10:22 AM, Alan McKay <alan.mckay at gmail.com> wrote: >> >> I haven't used it for a while, but I thought it had an indexing >> mechanism that would let you tell it what you want and it would tell >> you the tapes you need and the order to restore them (for full + >> incremental cases). And it could re-index the tapes if you lost the >> disk copy. Maybe that doesn't fit your use, but it seemed handy. >> > > In general it is massive overkill for what I"m doing. Even if I wanted to > switch backup solutions and move my backups to Amanda it would not be > worthwhile to get this as an add-on because of the nature of the data I am > dealing with. > > Case in point I have about 300G of data that one of the scientists copied > over to my server from a piece of scientific equipment. That 300G was > never in my backups and I never want it to be. But he needs it archived. > > Amanda is just way, way too too big for this. > > In 2 weeks I've got a program written that is tailored exactly to our > needs. THat's probably less time than it would have taken me to deploy > Amanda. And it would not have been tailored precisely to our needs. 'Deploying' amanda is a matter of installing the rpm and editing a couple of config files about the tape drive, tapes, targets, and holding space. And maybe some firewall tweaking - but nothing really complicated. You get a lot of coverage of 'real-world' problems already built in that will be hard to match in a new program, but you do have to think the way it does... -- Les Mikesell lesmikesell at gmail.com