[geeks] amanda

[James Sharp]

On Sat, 10 Nov 2001, Rob wrote:

> Difficult if not impossible. Amanda should still be considered in the
> Alpha stages and has whole hordes of problems doing real life backups.
> These problems are not limited to:

I've been running amanda 2.5.1 for about a year now without too many
problems.

>
> 1)Unable to span data to tapes.

Yup. Thats a problem.  People are working on it, though (i know...that's
said about everything these days).

> 2)Unreliable support for autoloaders.

I've got an 80 slot/4 drive Exabyte that its quite happy with.  Had to
hack the code a bit for it to use NetBSD's chio & scsi interfaces, though.

> 3)No recovery mechanism for failed backups.

For me, it just usually catches it on the next go-round.  For failed dumps
to tape, though, you have to manually start the holding-disk to tape dump.

> 4)Unable to use one tape for multiple backup jobs. (i.e. once you've
> dumped something to the tape, you can't use the balance of the tape for
> anything else.)

That's really by design.  If you dump a weeks worth of backups to one tape
and the tape gets upgefucked somehow, you've just lost a weeks worth of
data.

> 5)Since you're doing this over cablemodem, you'll have to design your own
> encryption method for the dump. (You may be able to hack it to tunnel
> through ssh.)

the amanda protocol is udp...I dunno of ssh will tunnel UDP.  Check the
current CVS stuff at amanda.sourceforge.net & see if they've incorporated
network encryption yet.

>
> You're in for a lot of pain if you try.
>

Perhaps...perhaps not.


> - Rob
>
> On Sat, 10 Nov 2001, Bill Bradford wrote:
>
> > anybody using amanda for backups?
> >