1 Amanda (The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver) Backup
4 Copyright (c) 1991-1998 University of Maryland at College Park
5 Copyright (c) 2007-2012 Zmanda, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
8 PLEASE NOTE: THIS SOFTWARE IS BEING MADE AVAILABLE "AS-IS". We make
9 no warranties that it will work for you. As such there is no support
10 available other than users helping each other on the Amanda mailing
11 lists or forums. Formal support may be available through vendors.
17 Amanda is a backup system designed to backup and archive many
18 computers on a network to disk, tape changer/drive or cloud storage.
20 Here are some features of Amanda:
22 * Written in C and Perl.
24 * Freely distributable source and executable. University of Maryland
25 (BSD style) license and GPL.
27 * Built on top of standard backup software: Unix dump/restore, GNU
28 Tar and other archival tools. It is extensible to support new
29 archival applications.
31 * Open file and tape formats. If necessary, you can use standard
32 tools like mt and GNU Tar to recover data.
34 * Backs up 32 and 64 bit Windows machines.
36 * Will back up multiple machines in parallel to a holding disk. Once
37 a dump is complete, Amanda will copy finished dumps one by one to
38 virtual tape on a disk or tape as fast as it can. For example:
40 * A 30 GB backup to virtual tape on disk may take less than 75
43 * A 41GB backup to AIT5 (25MB/s transfer) may take 40 minutes of
46 * Maintains a catalog of files being backed up and their location on
49 * Does tape management: e.g. Amanda will not overwrite the wrong
52 * For a restore, tells you what tapes you need, and finds the proper
53 backup image on the tape for you.
55 * Supports tape changers via a generic interface. Easily
56 customizable to any type of tape library, carousel, robot,
57 stacker, or virtual tape that can be controlled via the unix
60 * Device API provides a pluggable interface to storage
61 devices. Bundled drivers support tapes and virtual tapes on disk,
62 DVD-RW, RAIT, and Amazon S3. The bundled amvault can then copy to
63 removable media for off-site (D2D2T) or cloud storage (D2D2C).
65 * Supports secure communication between server and client using
66 OpenSSH, allowing secure backup of machines in a DMZ or out in the
69 * Can encrypt backup archives on Amanda client or on Amanda server
70 using GPG or any encryption program.
72 * Can compress backup archives before sending or after sending over
73 the network, with compress, gzip or a custom program.
75 * Supports Kerberos 5 security, including encrypted dumps.
77 * Recovers gracefully from errors, including down or hung machines.
79 * Reports results in detail, including all errors, via email.
81 * Dynamically adjusts the backup schedule to keep within
82 constraints: no more juggling by hand when adding disks and
83 computers to your network.
85 * Backup normalization: Amanda schedules full and incremental
86 backups so you don't have to, and so as to spread the load across
87 the backup cycle. Amanda will intelligently promote a backup level
88 in case it is determines that is optimal for resources.
90 * Includes a pre-run checker program, that conducts sanity checks on
91 both the tape server host and all the client hosts (in parallel),
92 and will send an e-mail report of any problems that could cause
97 * Runs transparently from cron as needed.
99 * Span tapes, i.e. if a single backup is too large for one tape,
100 Amanda will split it and put the pieces on multiple tapes
103 * Application API allows custom backups for applications such as
104 relational databases, or for special file systems.
106 * Executes user-provided pre- and post-backup scripts, for,
107 e.g. enforcing database referential integrity.
109 * Award-winning! Including: Linux Journal Readers' Choice Award.
111 * Lots of other options; Amanda is very configurable.
113 WHAT ARE THE SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR AMANDA?
114 --------------------------------------------
116 Amanda requires a host that has access to disks (local, NAS or SAN) or
117 a large capacity tape drive or library. All modern tape formats,
118 e.g. LTO, EXABYTE, DAT or DLT are supported. This becomes the "backup
119 server host". All the computers you are going to backup are the
120 "backup client hosts". The server host can also be a client host.
122 Amanda works best with one or more large "holding disk" partitions on
123 the server host available to it for buffering dumps before writing to
124 tape. The holding disk allows Amanda to run backups in parallel to
125 the disk, only writing them to tape when the backup is finished. Note
126 that the holding disk is not required: without it Amanda will run
127 backups sequentially to the tape drive. Running it this way may not
128 be optimal for performance, but still allows you to take advantage of
129 Amanda's other features.
131 As a rule of thumb, for best performance the holding disk should be
132 larger than the dump output from your largest disk partitions. For
133 example, if you are backing up some terabyte disks that compress down
134 to 500 GB, then you'll want at least 500 GB on your holding disk. On
135 the other hand, if those terabyte drives are partitioned into 50 GB
136 filesystems, they'll probably compress down to 25 GB and you'll only
137 need that much on your holding disk. Amanda will perform better with
138 larger holding disks.
140 Actually, Amanda will still work if you have full dumps that are
141 larger than the holding disk: Amanda will send those dumps directly to
142 tape one at a time. If you have many such dumps you will be limited
143 by the dump speed of those machines.
146 WHAT SYSTEMS DOES AMANDA RUN ON?
147 --------------------------------
149 Amanda should run on any modern Unix system that supports dump or GNU
150 tar, has sockets and inetd (or a replacement such as xinetd), and
151 either system V shared memory, or BSD mmap implemented.
153 In particular, Amanda has been compiled, and the client side tested on
154 the following systems:
157 BSDI BSD/OS 2.1 and 3.1
158 DEC OSF/1 3.2 and 4.0
160 GNU/Linux 2.6 on x86, m68k, alpha, sparc, arm and powerpc
161 HP-UX 9.x and 10.x (x >= 01)
165 OpenBSD 2.5 x86, sparc, etc (ports available)
169 Windows: XP Pro (Server pack 2), 2003 server, Vista, 2008
170 server R2, Windows 7 (*)
172 (*) The Amanda server side is known to run on all of the other
173 machines except on those marked with an asterisk.
175 Backup operations can be CPU and Memory intensive (e.g. for
176 compression and encryption operations). It is recommended that you
177 have a server class CPU in the backup server.
180 WHERE DO I GET AMANDA?
181 ----------------------
183 Amanda, including its source tree, is on SourceForge:
185 http://sourceforge.net/projects/amanda
188 http://www.amanda.org/download.php
190 Most Linux distributions include amanda rpms or debian packages
191 pre-built for various architectures. Pre-built binaries are also
194 http://www.zmanda.com/download-amanda.php
196 HOW DO I GET AMANDA UP AND RUNNING?
197 -----------------------------------
199 Read the file docs/INSTALL. There are a variety of steps, from
200 compiling Amanda to installing it on the backup server host and the
203 docs/INSTALL contains general installation instructions.
204 docs/NEWS details new features in each release.
206 You can read Amanda documentation at:
208 http://www.amanda.org
210 and at the Amanda wiki:
212 http://wiki.zmanda.com
214 WHO DO I TALK TO IF I HAVE A PROBLEM?
215 -------------------------------------
217 You can get Amanda help and questions answered from the mailing lists and
220 ==> To join a mailing list, DO NOT, EVER, send mail to that list. Send
221 mail to <listname>-request@amanda.org, or amanda-lists@amanda.org,
222 with the following line in the body of the message:
223 subscribe <listname> <your-email-address>
225 You will receive an email acknowledging your subscription. Keep
226 it. Should you ever wish to depart our company, it has unsubscribe
227 and other useful information.
230 The amanda-announce mailing list is for important announcements
231 related to the Amanda Network Backup Manager package, including new
232 versions, contributions, and fixes. NOTE: the amanda-users list is
233 itself on the amanda-announce distribution, so you only need to
234 subscribe to one of the two lists, not both.
235 To subscribe, send a message to amanda-announce-request@amanda.org.
238 The amanda-users mailing list is for questions and general discussion
239 about the Amanda Network Backup Manager. NOTE: the amanda-users list
240 is itself on the amanda-announce distribution, so you only need to
241 subscribe to one of the two lists, not both.
242 To subscribe, send a message to amanda-users-request@amanda.org.
245 The amanda-hackers mailing list is for discussion of the
246 technical details of the Amanda package, including extensions,
247 ports, bugs, fixes, and alpha testing of new versions.
248 To subscribe, send a message to amanda-hackers-request@amanda.org.
250 Amanda forums: http://forums.zmanda.com
252 Amanda Platform Experts: http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Platform_Experts
254 Backup, Share and Enjoy,
255 The Amanda Development Team