AMANDA, the Advanced Maryland
Automatic Network Disk Archiver, is a backup
system that allows the administrator to set up a single master backup
server to back up multiple hosts over network to tape drives/changers
or disks or optical media.
Amanda uses native dump and/or GNU tar facilities and can back
up a large number of workstations running multiple versions of Unix.
Amanda 3.3.3
Price
Free to download Size
4.2MB
License
Amanda Copyright and License Developer Amanda Development Team including James da Silva,
Mike Grupenhoff, James Mathiesen, George Scott and many others.
Has configuration options for controlling almost all
aspects of
the backup operation and provides several scheduling methods
Designed to handle large numbers of clients and data,
yet is reasonably simple to install and maintain. It scales well, so
small configurations, even a single host, are possible
It will back up multiple machines in parallel to a holding
disk. For example, a ~2 Gb 8mm tape on a ~240K/s interface to
a host with a large holding disk can be filled by Amanda in
under 4 hours
Supports a wide range of tape storage devices. It uses
basic operations through the normal operating system I/O subsystem and
a
simple definition of characteristics. New devices are usually trivial
to add
Supports secure communication between server and client
using OpenSSH
Supports using more than one tape in a single run, but does
not yet split a dump image across tapes. This also means it does not
support dump images larger than a single tape
Either the client or tape server may do software
compression, or hardware compression may be used. On the client side,
software
compression reduces network traffic. On the server side, it reduces
client CPU load. Software compression may be selected on an
image-by-image basis
Supports Kerberos 4 security, including encrypted dumps
Can encrypt dumps on Amanda client or on Amanda client
using GPG or any encryption program
Support for:
Periodic archival backup, such as taking full dumps to a vault away
from the primary site
Incremental-only backups where full dumps are done outside of Amanda,
such as very active areas that must be taken offline, or no full dumps
at all for areas that can easily be recovered from vendor media
Always doing full dumps, such as database areas that change completely
between each run or critical areas that are easier to deal with during
an emergency if they are a single-restore operation
Support for multiple simultaneous writes to storage devices
Support for LEOM in storage devices
Uses a simple tape management system and protects itself
from overwriting tapes that still have valid dump images and from tapes
not allocated to the configuration. Images may be overwritten when a
client is down for an extended period or if not enough tapes are
allocated, but only after Amanda has issued several warnings. Amanda
can also be told to not reuse specific tapes
A validation program may be used before each run to note
potential problems during normal working hours when they are easier to
correct. An activity report is sent via e-mail after each run. Amanda
can also send a report to a printer and even generate sticky tape
labels
Recovers gracefully from errors, including down or hung
machines
Includes a pre-run checker program, that conducts sanity
checks on both the tape server host and all the client hosts
(in parallel), and will send an e-mail report of any problems
that could cause the backups to fail
Amanda also features in our 'Linux
Equivalents to Windows Software' section. The category
chooser below allows you to focus on different types of software
included in that section.
