Amanda CDRW-Taper 0.4

Amanda is a client/server application for making remote backups. While originating from a UNIX environment, it also supports backups of windows machines (via the smbclient utility). Client software for other machines is planned. See the Amanda homepage for details.

Amanda CDRW-Taper program is a drop-in replacement for the taper component of the Amanda backup system. CDRW-Taper makes it possible to dump backups to CD-RW, DVD+RW or DVD-RW instead of tape. CDRW-Taper is licensed under the GNU general public license (version 2) (see COPYING for more information).

The original version of the CDRW-Taper simply copied the backed up data from Amandas holding disk to an intermediate directory. After the backup was finished, the CDRW-Taper program created an ISO-9660 image from the intermediate directory which was burnt on a CDRW.

After using this setup for about half a year it became clear, that CDRW media were simply too small for our purposes. While Amanda does support tape changers, the CDRW-Taper has no such equivalent.

One option was to move to a larger type of media, like DVD+R or "double density" CDRW, without changing the software. The other, at that time cheaper option was to change the software to emulate some kind of CDRW changer.

The idea is to have the taper copy the backed up data to several intermediate directories, each representing a single CDRW. After the backup is finished, these can be burnt to CDRW one by one. The changing of the media can be done manually.

The nice thing about this is that this way you can also back up to hard disk. Diskspace has become cheap, so you can have all of your backups available online, and still burn them all on removable media (to be stored in a safe place).

Meanwhile, DVD+RW have become sufficiently cheap to present an interesting alternative to the clumsy manual process involved with backups to multiple CDRW. Therefore, the current version has been extended to support backup to DVD+R/+RW and DVD-R/-RW media as well, using the dvd+rw-tools.