Amanda is a powerful network backup application created by the University
of Maryland at College Park. Amanda is a robust backup and restore
application best suited to unattended backups with an autoloading tape drive
of adequate capacity. It benefits from good user support and documentation.
Amanda’s features include compression and encryption. It is intended for use
with high-capacity tape drives, floptical, CD-R, and CD-RW devices.
Amanda uses GNU tar and dump; it is intended for unattended, automated
tape backups and is not well suited for interactive or ad hoc backups. The
support for tape devices in Amanda is robust, and file restoration is relatively
simple. Although Amanda does not support older Macintosh clients, it uses
Samba to backup Microsoft Windows clients, as well as any UNIX client that
can use GNU tools (including macOS). Because Amanda runs on top of
standard GNU tools, file restoration can be made using those tools on a
recovery disk even if the Amanda server is not available. File compression
can be done on either the client or server, thus lightening the computational
load on less-powerful machines that need to be backed up.
CAUTION
Amanda does not support dump images larger than a single tape and
requires a new tape for each run. If you forget to change a tape, Amanda
continues to attempt backups until you insert a new tape, but those backups
will not capture the data as you intended them to. Do not use a tape that is
too small or forget to change a tape, or you will not be happy with the
results.There is no GUI for Amanda. Configuration is done in the time-honored
UNIX tradition of editing text configuration files located in /etc/amanda.
The default installation in Ubuntu includes a sample cron file because it is
expected that you will be using cron to run Amanda regularly. The client
utilities are installed with the package amanda-client; the Amanda server
is called amanda-server. Install both. As far as backup schemes are
concerned, Amanda calculates an optimal scheme on-the-fly and schedules it
accordingly. It can be forced to adhere to a traditional scheme, but other tools
are possibly better suited for that job.
The man page for Amanda (the client is amdump) is well written and useful,
explaining both the configuration of Amanda and detailing the several
programs that actually make up Amanda. The configuration files found in
/etc/amanda are well commented; they provide a number of examples to
assist you with configuration.
The program’s home page is www.amanda.org. There you can find