CentOS - Jan 2012 - Is Amanda "vaulting" what I need for archiving data?

Hi folks,

I've got a bit of a different scenario than I imagine most, and have spent
the last 60 or 90 minutes searching Amanda list archives and googling, but
did not come up with anything much.   Then I went browsing around the
Amanda website and found "vaulting" and was wondering whether this
would
suit my needs.

I'm basically searching around for a backup solution and trying to decide
whether to use something off the shelf or just roll my own with gtar.  It
is important to me that my solution use standard tools like dump/restore /
gtar on the back end, which is how I ended up at Amanda.  In looking
through some of the initial configuration how-tos it seemed as though this
was massively over-complex for my application.  But then I hit upon
"vaulting"

http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/How_To:Copy_Data_from_Volume_to_Volume

This is not exactly my scenario, but maybe there is another way to roll a
"vaulting" solution to suit me.

Basically I work in a scientific research lab (stem cell research) where
the scientists produce a fair bit of raw data.   We want to periodically
take the data and archive it to tape and then remove it from disk and store
the tape in our archival facility.  We'd need a record of what is on each
tape of course.  But this would not be the same scenario as in the link
above because it would not be taking data from 2ndary to tertiary storage.
 It would essentially be taken from primary to tertiary directly.  i.e.
directly from disk to tape.   But not in an automated fashion like typical
nightly dumps.  On request, we'd take the scientist's data and copy it
over
to our server that has the tape unit, then dump it out to tape, and remove
it from the disk there.   Once verified, we could tell the scientist it is
OK to remove their primary data now, and then we'd store the tape.

Is Amanda suited to this?  Or is there another application I should be
looking at?

thanks,
-Alan

-- 
?Don't eat anything you've ever seen advertised on TV?
         - Michael Pollan, author of "In Defense of Food"

Hey, Alan,

Alan McKay wrote:
<snip>
> gtar on the back end, which is how I ended up at Amanda.  In looking
> through some of the initial configuration how-tos it seemed as though this
> was massively over-complex for my application.  But then I hit upon
> "vaulting"
>
> http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/How_To:Copy_Data_from_Volume_to_Volume
<snip>
> Basically I work in a scientific research lab (stem cell research) where
> the scientists produce a fair bit of raw data.   We want to periodically
> take the data and archive it to tape and then remove it from disk and
> store the tape in our archival facility.  We'd need a record of what is
<snip>
For one thing, I think you seriously need to look at backup up to offline
hard drives, instead of tapes. Unless you really want/need to archive the
tapes for seven years, or whatever, legally, tapes are not the preferred
solution these days: they're very slow to use for recovery, and h/d's
are
large and fast, and still cheap.

We back up to backup servers, then, every couple of weeks, I run rsync
backups (well, we have a locally-rolled system to run the rsync) onto
offline drives - in our case, I swap large drives into an eSATA drive bay.
When I'm done, they go in the fire safe.

I will note that I work for a US federal agency who I shouldn't mention (I
do not speak for the agency or my employer), and our division generates a
lot of data, also: easily half a terabyte for one user, and a number for
the group that does protein folding....

         mark