On Monday 21 October 2002 02:09, Joseph Sirucka wrote:
>Hi All
>
>I would like to ask the question of being able to back partitions
> with amanda over multiple tapes. E.g. backuping up one partition
> with three tapes etc.
>
Amanda cannot span one backup file across more than one tape.  Its 
considered to be a huge dependability loss to do so, and likely 
that will never be implemented by amanda.

However, there are other ways of approaching the tape size vs 
partition size dilemma.

The most commonly done method requires that you use tar, not dump.  
This has several advantages in that one can name a directory and 
tar will recurse thru that directory and all beyond it.  It also 
has the advamntage that there are 2 or 3 ways to define an 
exception, a location(s) that is not to be backed up, a large 
advantage IMO.  These are things that dump cannot do.

What you do is, using my 37 gig /usr as an example, is make entries 
in the 'disklist' that reach one more directory level up the tree, 
as in /usr/bin is an entry, /usr/local is another, continueing 
until you have all the second level subdirs of /usr defined.

This method also allows you to fine tune the compression level or 
use/not use on a per subdir basis as theres no use wasting time 
trying to compress a directory full of tar.gz, or .bz2 files, they 
might even get bigger!

I'm backing up a 60 gig system here, with about 25 gigs used, onto a 
single 4gig tape each night, on a current dumpcyle of 6 days, 
averageing about 2.5 gigs on the tape each night over that time 
period.  As it appears I still have tape capacity to spare, I may 
move the dumpcycle to 5 days eventually.  I went from 7 to 6 on Oct 
9th, and I've been waiting to see how that balances out over the 
rest of the month.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
AMD K6-III@500mhz 320M
Athlon1600XP@1400mhz  512M
99.18% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly