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.
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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: [ read full changelog ]
· Amanda-3.1.2 has a known security vulnerability, and all users should upgrade to Amanda-3.1.3 as soon as possible.
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