From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Feb 4 6:12:22 2003 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from mx1.FreeBSD.org (mx1.freebsd.org [216.136.204.125]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 5D36737B401 for ; Tue, 4 Feb 2003 06:12:21 -0800 (PST) Received: from lv.raad.tartu.ee (lv.raad.tartu.ee [194.126.106.110]) by mx1.FreeBSD.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 37A4543F79 for ; Tue, 4 Feb 2003 06:12:20 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from toomas.aas@raad.tartu.ee) Received: Message by Barricade lv.raad.tartu.ee with ESMTP id h14ECFm29968; Tue, 4 Feb 2003 16:12:16 +0200 Message-Id: <200302041412.h14ECFm29968@lv.raad.tartu.ee> Received: from INFO/SpoolDir by raad.tartu.ee (Mercury 1.48); 4 Feb 03 16:11:43 +0200 Received: from SpoolDir by INFO (Mercury 1.48); 4 Feb 03 16:11:34 +0200 From: "Toomas Aas" Organization: Tartu City Government To: James Dory , questions@freebsd.org Date: Tue, 4 Feb 2003 16:11:33 +0200 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset=US-ASCII Content-transfer-encoding: 7BIT Subject: Re: backup strategy/location holding disk In-reply-to: <3E3F0041.1090500@ci.nome.ak.us> Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk List-ID: List-Archive: (Web Archive) List-Help: (List Instructions) List-Subscribe: List-Unsubscribe: X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Hi! > I've got 30 gigs free so far on both Raqs but that will shrink over > time. It would be plenty for now perhaps to set up a holding disk on. > But as it fills, it would be too small for a system wide backup. Can't > add another harddrive to the raqs. So there is that old Dell server > sitting there. It doesn't have an exterior scsi port for the tape drive. > I could add perhaps a big IDE hard drive to it (a big scsi drive is too > costly for this budget operation). Can Amanda, which I have installed > now on the raq with the tape, use a 'client' or that Dell for a holding > disk or does it make more sense to have the amanda server on the > computer with the holding disk? The entire point of having a holding disk is to quickly pull the data to the machine with a tape drive from all over the network and then write it from holding disk to tape. The idea is that this way the tape drive can be kept streaming - it doesn't have to wait as data is pulled from each client. So, having a holding disk on a machine other than the one with tape drive kind of defeats the purpose. The holding disk is not mandatory. It helps the speed of backups if you have it, but having a holding disk smaller than the amount of data to be backed up (or even no holding disk at all) is perfectly legal. > I did a quick seach of the archives about whether Amanda does > differential backups and didn't find much. Is it just incremental/full? Amanda can definitely do differential backups when using dump as a backup program. I'm not sure about tar since I don't use it. -- Toomas Aas | toomas.aas@raad.tartu.ee | http://www.raad.tartu.ee/~toomas/ * No, `Eureka' is Greek for `This bath is too hot.' To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message