Backup (was: drive controller Q?)

[Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca>]

> That would probably bother me eventually. Amanda would need 5 drives,
> cuz it uses a dedicated holding disk and completes the DLE to it,
> before moving the completed DLE to the vtape. A decided advantage in
> terms of preventing a real tape from being shoe shined to death, but
> relatively unimportant in this case.

I was a very happy user of Amanda many years ago, but indeed, nowadays
all my backups are done onto HDDs, and in that context Amanda's features
don't really match the hardware very well.

I have since switched to `bup` and am really happy with it: uses much
less disk space, erases the difference between incremental and full
backups, can trivially check that your backup files are still valid
(and can recover from a few lost sectors even), and makes it easy to
synchronize with a copy of your backup stored on another machine.


        Stefan