On Fri, Oct 25, 2002 at 02:20:43PM -0600, Christopher C.J. Keist wrote:

> I have mtx working and it looks like it sees the juke box and can talk

That's a good start.

> with it.  I'm not looking at amanda to do regular backups but rather 
> just periodic archives of certain files/directories.

Well, amanda's real strength is its ability to manage the backup of a large
number of clients to one server which may have a (relatively) small tape
drive, and to keep indices of everything backed up to aid in restores. So it
may well be that if you want to periodically archive certain projects to
optical disks, some other tool like rsync with some homebrewed scripts may
do the job for you.

If OTOH you think Amanda IS the tool for you then version 2.4.3 does support
backup to disk. It treats disk directories as tapes and has its own version
of mt and AFAIR dd which support this world view (standard mt doesn't do
anything sensible when asked to rewind a directory). I do daily backups with
amanda to large IDE drives and I have created a large number of directories
(~ tapes) which I have labelled with amlabel. My daily backup script looks in
the tapelist and symlinks the appropriate directory to the directory which
amanda is configured to use for backup. Now that I write this I suspect that
I could have told amanda I had a changer and written a customised mtx script
which would have done about the same thing. However, I suspect it would have
been more work for no net gain.

In your case, you could use a similar approach - you would tell amanda to
use e.g. /optical1 as its backup device. Your backup script would need to
look at tapelist to see what tape (disk) amanda needed next, and then it
would need to use mtx to load the appropriate piece of media into the
appropriate drive and mount it. I don't think that amanda will be able to
make use of the 10 drives you have available, and there might thus be issues
with other uses of the device i.e. if you have amanda configured to use
/optical1 and at the time of a backup, some other user is using that drive.
However, I think suitable imaginative use of symlinks would get around that
problem.

> So just looking to see if anyone has configured a optical juke box to 
> work with Amanda.

I haven't, so my 2c worth may not even be worth 2c (in fact my 2c as I write
are worth 1.95c to you :-) )


Kindest regards,



Niall O Broin