AMANDA 2.5.1p2 review

AMANDA, the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, is a backup system that allows the administrator of a LAN to set up a

License: GPL (GNU General Public License) File size: 0K Developer: Amanda Development Team

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AMANDA, the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, is a backup system that allows the administrator of a LAN to set up a single master backup server to back up multiple hosts to a single large capacity tape drive.

AMANDA uses native dump and/or GNU tar facilities and can back up a large number of workstations running multiple versions of Unix. Recent versions can also use SAMBA to back up Microsoft Windows hosts.

Here are some key features of "AMANDA":
written in C, freely distributable.
built on top of standard backup software: Unix dump/restore, GNU Tar and others.
will back up multiple machines in parallel to a holding disk, blasting finished dumps one by one to tape as fast as we can write files to tape. 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.
does simple tape management: will not overwrite the wrong tape.
supports tape changers via a generic interface. Easily customizable to any type of tape carousel, robot, or stacker that can be controlled via the unix command line.
supports Kerberos 4 security, including encrypted dumps. The Kerberos support is available as a separate add-on package, see the file KERBEROS.HOW-TO-GET on the ftp site, and the file docs/KERBEROS in this package, for more details.
for a restore, tells you what tapes you need, and finds the proper backup image on the tape for you.
recovers gracefully from errors, including down or hung machines.
reports results, including all errors in detail, in email.
will dynamically adjust backup schedule to keep within constraints: no more juggling by hand when adding disks and computers to network.
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.
can compress dumps before sending or after sending over the net, with either compress or gzip.
can optionally synchronize with external backups, for those large timesharing computers where you want to do full dumps when the system is down in single-user mode (since BSD dump is not reliable on active filesystems): Amanda will still do your daily dumps.
lots of other options; Amanda is very configurable.

What's New in This Release:
Many bugs fixed
amoverview is working
dumptype starttime is working