tape / rev backups

[Brian K. White]

D. Thomas Podnar wrote:
>> Tom P,
>> In your copious free time, I want this!
>>
>> http://www.amanda.org/docs/rait.html
>>
>> This would be awsome with rev drives.
>>

> Striping tape drives (or REV drives) is definitely an interesting
> concept. Scary, because the carbon-units involved in most environments
> have trouble putting ONE tape in the right spot every night, let alone
> three, but interesting nonetheless ;).

Maybe it doesn't matter about which tape is in which drive. It's not like a 
raid card in hardware where any change = instant invalid array. You are 
popping the tapes out and replacing them constantly. So I would hope they 
just put some kind of header info on each tape that says I'm member 0 of a 
group of 3 of job big-unique-id.

The carbon units would then only need to manage to keep any two of a group 
together. Still a challenge I know.
As long as the total cycle of jobs is small like one or two weeks, color 
coding the tapes would be good enough.
if you are trying to keep more than a dozen or so sets in circulatin though 
I think you start to run out of very dissimilar colors.

Brian K. White  --  brian at aljex.com  --  http://www.aljex.com/bkw/
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