Yes, but the solution of copying to fake 4GB tapes and then to DVD-R/RW somehow seems inelegant. Especially when you simply do not have the room to hold the images before you can burn them to DVD-R/RW. I have 500GB total on my server spread across four drives and I may be able to find maybe 100GB in 30 and 50GB chunks, but not really a solution for doing a system backup. It is just seeming that optical is starting to be feasible as one DVD-R/RW single later basically holds as much data as an older DAT2 tape (about 4.5GB) not to mention dual layer DVDs and the size keeps rising every year. Not to mention faster (at least my old DAT2 drive seemed to take forever writing a tape) and maybe less prone to damage (magnets anyone?). Though as always stepping on tapes or DVDs is nearly always fatal. Of course price is always an issue... Hmmm a 100 pack of 4GB DVD-R is about $34 US for me... Plus the drives are fairly cheap.. So I agree it is something to keep an eye on. The packages I am looking at so far are... Mondo seems to be able to do CD-R... Might be something to keep an eye on to see if they incorporate DVD tech. http://www.mondorescue.org/ BackupEDGE seems to be a commercial product that supports DVD-R/RW http://www.microlite.com/ Cdbkup cdbackup multicd RAB..... Ian On 6/12/05 5:16 PM, "Pedro Fernandes Macedo" <webmaster@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > Michael A. Peters wrote: > >> I've tested none so I can't recommend one, but I definitely want to >> watch this thread. >> Amanda seems to be the standard for a long time now, but I believe it >> only works with tape drives (is it possible to use a loopback device as >> tape drive and then burn the image??) >> >> > > I use it to backup to HDD. In my configuration , it emulates a set of > 300MB tapes that you can burn to disk (the tapes are only a tar.gz file > with a text preamble. This preamble even has instructions on how to use > dd and tar to recover anything directly from the file , or you can use > the amrecover tool to automatically recover what you need. > As for DVD, I dont know if amanda supports it. But then , you can always > make a backup to disk using fake 4GB tapes and then after the backup is > done , you simply copy it to DVD. > > As for it being a standard.. It is an excelent tool . I've worked with > it on my last job as sysadmin and it helps a lot. No need to have tape > drives and manually searching for a file on all tapes.. Just remmember > to backup you tape index files.. Without them , all you can do is > manually recover from the tapes, without the help from amrecover. > > -- > Pedro Macedo
