1 Amanda, The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver
2 Copyright (c) 1991-1998 University of Maryland at College Park
5 See the files COPYRIGHT, COPYRIGHT-REGEX and COPYRIGHT-APACHE for
6 distribution conditions and official warranty disclaimer.
8 PLEASE NOTE: THIS SOFTWARE IS BEING MADE AVAILABLE ``AS-IS''. UMD is making
9 this work available so that other people can use it. This software is in
10 production use at our home site - the UMCP Department of Computer Science -
11 but we make no warranties that it will work for you. Amanda development is
12 unfunded - the development team maintains the code in their spare time. As a
13 result, there is no support available other than users helping each other on
14 the Amanda mailing lists. See below for information on the mailing lists.
20 This is a release of Amanda, the Advanced Maryland Automatic
21 Network Disk Archiver. Amanda is a backup system designed to archive many
22 computers on a network to a single large-capacity tape drive.
24 Here are some features of Amanda:
26 * written in C, freely distributable.
27 * built on top of standard backup software: Unix dump/restore, GNU Tar
29 * will back up multiple machines in parallel to a holding disk, blasting
30 finished dumps one by one to tape as fast as we can write files to
31 tape. For example, a ~2 Gb 8mm tape on a ~240K/s interface to a host
32 with a large holding disk can be filled by Amanda in under 4 hours.
33 * does simple tape management: will not overwrite the wrong tape.
34 * supports tape changers via a generic interface. Easily customizable to
35 any type of tape carousel, robot, or stacker that can be controlled via
36 the unix command line.
37 * supports Kerberos 4 security, including encrypted dumps. The Kerberos
38 support is available as a separate add-on package, see the file
39 KERBEROS.HOW-TO-GET on the ftp site, and the file docs/KERBEROS in this
40 package, for more details.
41 * for a restore, tells you what tapes you need, and finds the proper
42 backup image on the tape for you.
43 * recovers gracefully from errors, including down or hung machines.
44 * reports results, including all errors in detail, in email.
45 * will dynamically adjust backup schedule to keep within constraints: no
46 more juggling by hand when adding disks and computers to network.
47 * includes a pre-run checker program, that conducts sanity checks on both
48 the tape server host and all the client hosts (in parallel), and will
49 send an e-mail report of any problems that could cause the backups to
51 * can compress dumps before sending or after sending over the net, with
52 either compress or gzip.
53 * can optionally synchronize with external backups, for those large
54 timesharing computers where you want to do full dumps when the system
55 is down in single-user mode (since BSD dump is not reliable on active
56 filesystems): Amanda will still do your daily dumps.
57 * lots of other options; Amanda is very configurable.
60 WHAT ARE THE SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR AMANDA?
61 --------------------------------------------
63 Amanda requires a host that is mostly idle during the time backups are
64 done, with a large capacity tape drive (e.g. an EXABYTE, DAT or DLT tape).
65 This becomes the "tape server host". All the computers you are going to dump
66 are the "backup client hosts". The server host can also be a client host.
68 Amanda works best with one or more large "holding disk" partitions on the
69 server host available to it for buffering dumps before writing to tape.
70 The holding disk allows Amanda to run backups in parallel to the disk, only
71 writing them to tape when the backup is finished. Note that the holding
72 disk is not required: without it Amanda will run backups sequentially to
73 the tape drive. Running it this way kills the great performance, but still
74 allows you to take advantage of Amanda's other features.
76 As a rule of thumb, for best performance the holding disk should be larger
77 than the dump output from your largest disk partitions. For example, if
78 you are backing up some full gigabyte disks that compress down to 500 MB,
79 then you'll want 500 MB on your holding disk. On the other hand, if those
80 gigabyte drives are partitioned into 500 MB filesystems, they'll probably
81 compress down to 250 MB and you'll only need that much on your holding
82 disk. Amanda will perform better with larger holding disks.
84 Actually, Amanda will still work if you have full dumps that are larger
85 than the holding disk: Amanda will send those dumps directly to tape one at
86 a time. If you have many such dumps you will be limited by the dump speed
89 Amanda does not yet support single backup images larger than a tape.
92 WHAT SYSTEMS DOES AMANDA RUN ON?
93 --------------------------------
95 Amanda should run on any modern Unix system that supports dump or GNU
96 tar, has sockets and inetd, and either system V shared memory, or BSD
99 In particular, Amanda 2.4.1p1 has been compiled, and the client side tested
100 on the following systems:
102 BSDI BSD/OS 2.1 and 3.1
103 DEC OSF/1 3.2 and 4.0
106 GNU/Linux on x86, m68k, alpha, sparc, arm and powerpc
109 OpenBSD 2.5 x86, sparc, etc (ports available)
110 SunOS 4.1.x (x >= 1) and 5.[567]
112 HP-UX 9.x and 10.x (x >= 01)
114 The Amanda 2.4.1p1 server side is known to run on all of the other
115 machines except on those marked with an asterisk.
117 If you know of any system that is not listed here on which amanda
118 builds successfully, either client&server or client-only, please
119 report to amanda-hackers@amanda.org.
122 WHERE DO I GET AMANDA?
123 ----------------------
125 There are several versions of Amanda. The latest version at the time
126 of this writing is available at:
128 ftp://ftp.amanda.org/pub/amanda
131 HOW DO I GET AMANDA UP AND RUNNING?
132 -----------------------------------
134 Read the file docs/INSTALL. There are a variety of steps, from compiling
135 Amanda to installing it on the tape server host and the client machines.
136 docs/INSTALL contains general installation instructions.
137 docs/SYSTEM.NOTES contains system-specific information.
138 docs/FAQ contains answers to frequently asked questions.
139 docs/KERBEROS explains installation under Kerberos 4.
140 docs/TAPE.CHANGERS explains how to customize the changer interface.
141 docs/WHATS.NEW details new features.
144 WHO DO I TALK TO IF I HAVE A PROBLEM?
145 -------------------------------------
147 Amanda is completely unsupported and made available as-is. However,
148 you may be able to get useful information in the Amanda mailing lists:
150 ==> To join a mailing list, DO NOT, EVER, send mail to that list. Send
151 mail to <listname>-request@amanda.org, or amanda-lists@amanda.org,
152 with the following line in the body of the message:
153 subscribe <listname> <your-email-address>
157 The amanda-announce mailing list is for important announcements
158 related to the Amanda Network Backup Manager package, including new
159 versions, contributions, and fixes. NOTE: the amanda-users list is
160 itself on the amanda-announce distribution, so you only need to
161 subscribe to one of the two lists, not both.
162 To subscribe, send a message to amanda-announce-request@amanda.org.
165 The amanda-users mailing list is for questions and general discussion
166 about the Amanda Network Backup Manager. This package and related
167 files are available via anonymous FTP from ftp.amanda.org in the
168 pub/amanda directory. NOTE: the amanda-users list is itself on the
169 amanda-announce distribution, so you only need to subscribe to one of
170 the two lists, not both.
171 To subscribe, send a message to amanda-users-request@amanda.org.
174 The amanda-hackers mailing list is for discussion of the
175 technical details of the Amanda package, including extensions,
176 ports, bugs, fixes, and alpha testing of new versions.
177 To subscribe, send a message to amanda-hackers-request@amanda.org.
181 The Amanda Development Team
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