Amanda CDRW-Taper
Peter Conrad, <conrad@tivano.de>
Richard Kunze, <kunze@tivano.de>
$Id: Overview.html,v 1.2 2006/03/10 14:13:14 conrad Exp $
Amanda is a client/server application
for making remote backups. While originating from a UNIX environment, it
also supports backups of windows machines (via the smbclient utility).
Client software for other machines is planned. See the
Amanda homepage for details.
The Amanda CDRW-Taper is a drop-in replacement for the taper component of
the Amanda backup system. CDRW-Taper makes it possible to dump backups to
CD-RW, DVD+RW or DVD-RW instead of tape. CDRW-Taper is licensed under the GNU
general public license (version 2) (see COPYING for
more information).
The original version of the CDRW-Taper simply copied the backed up data
from Amanda's holding disk to an intermediate directory. After the backup
was finished, the CDRW-Taper program created an ISO-9660 image from the
intermediate directory which was burnt on a CDRW.
After using this setup for about half a year it became clear, that CDRW
media were simply too small for our purposes. While Amanda does support
tape changers, the CDRW-Taper has no such equivalent.
One option was to move to a larger type of media, like DVD+R or "double
density" CDRW, without changing the software. The other, at that time
cheaper option was to change the software to emulate some kind of CDRW
changer.
The idea is to have the taper copy the backed up data to several
intermediate directories, each representing a single CDRW. After the
backup is finished, these can be burnt to CDRW one by one. The changing
of the media can be done manually.
The nice thing about this is that this way you can also back up to hard disk.
Diskspace has become cheap, so you can have all of your backups available
online, and still burn them all on removable media (to be stored in
a safe place).
Meanwhile, DVD+RW have become sufficiently cheap to present an interesting
alternative to the clumsy manual process involved with backups to multiple
CDRW. Therefore, the current version has been extended to support backup to
DVD+R/+RW and DVD-R/-RW media as well, using the
dvd+rw-tools.
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