[ On Sunday, October 13, 2002 at 23:30:46 (-0700), Greywolf wrote: ]
> Subject: Re: FYI: upgrading GNU tar
>
> Also, dump/restore's complexity also does not increase as the number
> of clients increases, really.

Dump/restore complexity definitely increases dramatically if you have a
limited number of tapes to use in a cycle and if you use anything more
than just full level-0 dumps.  Amanda automatically ensures that you
always have all the dump images for all the filesystems for the entire
tape cycle.  Doing that by hand gets quite tedious, and by hand it's
much harder to ensure that at the same time you keep tapes as full as
possible by promoting appropirate filesystems to level-0 earlier in the
cycle.  Finally the trick is to do your backups "religiously", not just
at your leisure, and I find I have a lot better things to do "at my
leisure" than figure out dump strategies for a dozen filesystems on an
ever increasing collection of clients.

Mind you there's getting to be little point to using tape of any kind
for most backup purposes in all but data warehouses when one can take
snapshots using rsync onto more disk that's now about $1/GB.  Even when
taken off-site in carriers such disks might have more lifetime than
equivalent physical-density tapes (so long as the disks are left powered
down), and you don't really have move the physical disks either if you
can get a high enough bandwidth connection to the off-site storage
location.  With some kind of RAID at both ends you get a lot closer to
having an effective disaster recovery plan too!  :-)

-- 
								Greg A. Woods

+1 416 218-0098;            <g.a.woods@ieee.org>;           <woods@robohack.ca>
Planix, Inc. <woods@planix.com>; VE3TCP; Secrets of the Weird <woods@weird.com>