Heya, Hauke,

Most of your points are quite good questions, but I think Matt knows
what he's talking about here.  Let me add some of my own conceptions:

- NDMP does not preclude dump, that I can tell -- if anything, it might
  augment it.

- Yes, there are proprietary multiplexers for tapes.  I don't see why we
  can't write one opensource.  On the other hand, while it speeds backups
  by keeping the tape drives streaming, it makes a NIGHTmare out of doing
  a restoral.  Restores are very slow from multiplex-dumped tape sets.
  And if one of those tapes across which how-many-machines are dumped
  in parallel goes bad, guess what?  You're well and fscked.  I'd just
  as soon pass on the multiplexing and go for raw multiple drives.

- I just finished a Veritas installation, and I don't want anything to do
  with either Veritas or Legato.  While it's flexible, it's also amazingly
  convolved.  We had to call in a consultant three times in order to get
  it set up properly.  The documentation is something like eight volumes.
  There has GOT to be a simpler approach to setting up a backup system.

- Personally, I *like* dump and restore; all the database manglement
  and indexing for tape location, etc., is just front end goop, really,
  and it could be glued on at any time.

- Whatever solution we use, it's GOT to have an option to force a tape
  rewaffle upon detection of end of tape, and it's got to have an option
  to say "spew data until you reach end of tape".  Or, better yet, if you
  give it the size/density parameters, that will do nothing more than to
  tell the program to calculate how much of the tape/how many tapes it's
  going to use.

- Some form of offline (removable) storage will need to be present;
  disaster recovery in the form of colocated redundancy may be common
  among businesses, or growing so, but it is not common practice among
  individuals.  I don't think tape storage for the individual market is
  going to suddenly evaporate; nor should our support for said devices.

Just a few thoughts; I don't think I'm all that far off the mark.

# Amanda backs up 30+ GB of disk storage with a 4GB Tandberg SLR5 streamer
# for me. Only requirement is that partition sizes have to be below 4GB
# because level 0 dumps have to fit on one tape. But 50GB QIC drives are
# readily available,. not to mention DLT or AIT drives.

Amanda is broken.  Period.  It can't handle multiple volumes.  Now if
that support gets added...

# 
# 	hauke
# 
# 
# --
# "It's never straight up and down"     (DEVO)
# 
# 
# 


				--*greywolf;
--
BSD: Resistance is NOT futile!