|
|
| Line 1: |
Line 1: |
| <div style="float: right;">__TOC__</div>
| | See {{man|7|amanda-devices}}. |
| =Introduction=
| |
| | |
| Since release 2.4.3, Amanda supports the usage of a VFS Device, with prefix "file:".
| |
| | |
| As the name suggests, this driver uses files on disk as virtual tapes. Amanda can write to and read from virtual tapes, just like real tapes. A bunch of virtual tapes can even be manipulated with a changer.
| |
| | |
| Possible Uses
| |
| * Disk-based installations: You can use the file driver to backup onto a set of virtual tapes hosted on a bunch of hard-disks or a RAID-system. Combined with another Amanda configuration that dumps the virtual tapes to real tapes, you can provide reliable backup with faster tapeless recovery. This is called "disk-to-disk-to-tape" backup by some people today.
| |
| | |
| * Inexpensive installations: Without buying a tape drive you can enjoy the benefits of Amanda and backup to a bunch of harddisks. You can create CD/DVD-sized backups which you can burn onto optical disks later. Or you can backup to external disks connected with Firewire or USB.
| |
| | |
| * Test installations: You can easily explore the rich features of Amanda on systems without tape drives. Virtual tapes are usually also much faster than many real tape drives. For a quick start, have a look at: [[Test environment with virtual tapes]].
| |
| | |
| Please be sure to understand the differences between holding disks and virtual tapes. The two serve different purposes; holding disks allow for parallelism of multiple disklist entries (DLE's) being backed up while virtual tapes are a replacement for physical tapes.
| |
| | |
| The virtual tapes are also called "vtapes" in this document.
| |
| | |
| = Using Virtual Tapes =
| |
| A virtual tape is implemented as a directory with a subdirectory named "data" in it.
| |
| | |
| # chown amanda:disk /amandatapes
| |
| # chmod 750 /amandatapes # backups contain secret files!
| |
| # su - amanda
| |
| $ mkdir -p /amandatapes/test/tape1/data
| |
| | |
| You can check a vtape using amdevcheck (available in version 2.6.0):
| |
| amdevcheck MYCONFIG file:/amandatapes/tape1
| |
| and can also label vtapes just like any other kind of tape:
| |
| amlabel MYCONFIG CONFIG017
| |
| | |
| Note that vtapes work well with <tt>chg-disk</tt>.
| |
| | |
| = See Also =
| |
| * [[How To:Set Up Virtual Tapes]]
| |
| | |
| = Credit =
| |
| Based on text by: Stefan G. Weichinger, November - December, 2003 ; minor updates in April, 2005.
| |