How To:Mirror Dumps to Virtual Tapes and Real Tapes using RAIT

If you have several tape devices on your system [currently either 3 or 5 drive sets are supported] you tell AMANDA to use them as a RAIT by listing them as a single tape device using /bin/csh curly-brace-and-comma notation, as in:

tapedev = "rait:/dev/rmt/tps0d{4,5,6}n"

which means that /dev/rmt/tps0d4n, /dev/rmt/tps0d5n, and /dev/rmt/tps0d6n are to be treated as a RAIT set. You can now mount three tapes, and label them with amlabel, etc.

Also, you want to create a new tape-type entry, which lists an n-drive RAIT set, for this RAIT-set. So if you were using an entry like:

define tapetype EXB-8500 {
       comment "Exabyte EXB-8500 drive on decent machine"
       length 4200 mbytes
       filemark 48 kbytes
       speed 474 kbytes
}

You would want to make a new one like:

define tapetype EXB-8500x3 {
       comment "Exabyte EXB-8500 3 drive stripe on decent machine"
       length 8400 mbytes
       filemark 200 kbytes
       speed 948 kbytes
}

and change your tapetype entry to: tapetype EXB-8500x3 to tell AMANDA about the multiple drive set.