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