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 sourceforge site, and the file docs/KERBEROS
40 in this package, for more details.
41 * Supports secure communication between server and client using OpenSSH.
42 * Can encrypt dumps on Amanda client or on Amanda client using GPG or any
44 * for a restore, tells you what tapes you need, and finds the proper
45 backup image on the tape for you.
46 * recovers gracefully from errors, including down or hung machines.
47 * reports results, including all errors in detail, in email.
48 * will dynamically adjust backup schedule to keep within constraints: no
49 more juggling by hand when adding disks and computers to network.
50 * includes a pre-run checker program, that conducts sanity checks on both
51 the tape server host and all the client hosts (in parallel), and will
52 send an e-mail report of any problems that could cause the backups to
54 * can compress dumps before sending or after sending over the net, with
55 either compress or gzip or custom program.
56 * can optionally synchronize with external backups, for those large
57 timesharing computers where you want to do full dumps when the system
58 is down in single-user mode (since BSD dump is not reliable on active
59 filesystems): Amanda will still do your daily dumps.
60 * lots of other options; Amanda is very configurable.
63 WHAT ARE THE SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR AMANDA?
64 --------------------------------------------
66 Amanda requires a host that is mostly idle during the time backups are
67 done, with a large capacity tape drive (e.g. an EXABYTE, DAT or DLT tape).
68 This becomes the "tape server host". All the computers you are going to dump
69 are the "backup client hosts". The server host can also be a client host.
71 Amanda works best with one or more large "holding disk" partitions on the
72 server host available to it for buffering dumps before writing to tape.
73 The holding disk allows Amanda to run backups in parallel to the disk, only
74 writing them to tape when the backup is finished. Note that the holding
75 disk is not required: without it Amanda will run backups sequentially to
76 the tape drive. Running it this way kills the great performance, but still
77 allows you to take advantage of Amanda's other features.
79 As a rule of thumb, for best performance the holding disk should be larger
80 than the dump output from your largest disk partitions. For example, if
81 you are backing up some full gigabyte disks that compress down to 500 MB,
82 then you'll want 500 MB on your holding disk. On the other hand, if those
83 gigabyte drives are partitioned into 500 MB filesystems, they'll probably
84 compress down to 250 MB and you'll only need that much on your holding
85 disk. Amanda will perform better with larger holding disks.
87 Actually, Amanda will still work if you have full dumps that are larger
88 than the holding disk: Amanda will send those dumps directly to tape one at
89 a time. If you have many such dumps you will be limited by the dump speed
93 WHAT SYSTEMS DOES AMANDA RUN ON?
94 --------------------------------
96 Amanda should run on any modern Unix system that supports dump or GNU
97 tar, has sockets and inetd, and either system V shared memory, or BSD
100 In particular, Amanda has been compiled, and the client side tested
101 on the following systems:
103 BSDI BSD/OS 2.1 and 3.1
104 DEC OSF/1 3.2 and 4.0
107 GNU/Linux on x86, m68k, alpha, sparc, arm and powerpc
111 OpenBSD 2.5 x86, sparc, etc (ports available)
112 SunOS 4.1.x (x >= 1) and 5.[567]
114 HP-UX 9.x and 10.x (x >= 01)
116 The Amanda server side is known to run on all of the other
117 machines except on those marked with an asterisk.
120 WHERE DO I GET AMANDA?
121 ----------------------
123 Amanda is a sourceforge.net project (http://sourceforge.net/projects/amanda).
124 Amanda source tree is available at the sourceforge website.
126 Most Linux distributions include amanda rpms pre-built for various
129 HOW DO I GET AMANDA UP AND RUNNING?
130 -----------------------------------
132 Read the file docs/INSTALL. There are a variety of steps, from compiling
133 Amanda to installing it on the tape server host and the client machines.
134 docs/INSTALL contains general installation instructions.
135 docs/NEWS details new features in each release.
137 You can read Amanda documentation at the official project-site
139 http://www.amanda.org
141 and at the AMANDA-Wiki at
143 http://wiki.zmanda.com and
145 WHO DO I TALK TO IF I HAVE A PROBLEM?
146 -------------------------------------
148 You can get Amanda help and questions answered from the mailing lists and
151 ==> To join a mailing list, DO NOT, EVER, send mail to that list. Send
152 mail to <listname>-request@amanda.org, or amanda-lists@amanda.org,
153 with the following line in the body of the message:
154 subscribe <listname> <your-email-address>
158 The amanda-announce mailing list is for important announcements
159 related to the Amanda Network Backup Manager package, including new
160 versions, contributions, and fixes. NOTE: the amanda-users list is
161 itself on the amanda-announce distribution, so you only need to
162 subscribe to one of the two lists, not both.
163 To subscribe, send a message to amanda-announce-request@amanda.org.
166 The amanda-users mailing list is for questions and general discussion
167 about the Amanda Network Backup Manager. NOTE: the amanda-users list
168 is itself on the amanda-announce distribution, so you only need to
169 subscribe to one of the two lists, not both.
170 To subscribe, send a message to amanda-users-request@amanda.org.
173 The amanda-hackers mailing list is for discussion of the
174 technical details of the Amanda package, including extensions,
175 ports, bugs, fixes, and alpha testing of new versions.
176 To subscribe, send a message to amanda-hackers-request@amanda.org.
178 ==> Amanda forums: http://forums.zmanda.com
181 The Amanda Development Team
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