Given $n_{f}$ sites, each equipped with one facility, and $n_{c}$ cities, fault tolerant facility location (FTFL) [K. Jain and V. V. Vazirani, APPROX '$00$: Proceedings of the Third International Workshop on Approximation Algorithms for Combinatorial Optimization, Spinger, New York, 2000, pp. 177--183] requires computing a minimum-cost connection scheme such that each city connects to a specified number of facilities. When each city connects to exactly one facility, FTFL becomes the classical uncapacitated facility location problem (UFL) that is well-known NP hard. The current best solution to FTFL admits an approximation ratio 1.7245 due to Byrka, Srinivasan, and Swamy applying the dependent rounding technique announced recently [Proceedings of IPCO, 2010, pp. 244--257], which improves the ratio 2.076 obtained by Swamy and Shmoys based on LP rounding [ACM Trans. Algorithms, 4 (2008), pp. 1--27]. In this paper, we study a variant of the FTFL problem, namely, fault tolerant facility allocation (FTFA), as a...