Amanda (The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver) Backup

Software

Copyright (c) 1991-1998 University of Maryland at College Park

Copyright (c) 2007-2012 Zmanda, Inc.  All Rights Reserved.

All Rights Reserved.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS SOFTWARE IS BEING MADE AVAILABLE "AS-IS".  We make

no warranties that it will work for you.  As such there is no support

available other than users helping each other on the Amanda mailing

lists or forums. Formal support may be available through vendors.

WHAT IS AMANDA?

---------------

Amanda is a backup system designed to backup and archive many

computers on a network to disk, tape changer/drive or cloud storage.

Here are some features of Amanda:

  * Written in C and Perl.

  * Freely distributable source and executable. University of Maryland

    (BSD style) license and GPL.

  * Built on top of standard backup software: Unix dump/restore, GNU

    Tar and other archival tools. It is extensible to support new

    archival applications.

  * Open file and tape formats. If necessary, you can use standard

    tools like mt and GNU Tar to recover data.

  * Backs up 32 and 64 bit Windows machines.

  * Will back up multiple machines in parallel to a holding disk. Once

    a dump is complete, Amanda will copy finished dumps one by one to

    virtual tape on a disk or tape as fast as it can.  For example:

    * A 30 GB backup to virtual tape on disk may take less than 75

      minutes.

    * A 41GB backup to AIT5 (25MB/s transfer) may take 40 minutes of

      tape time.

  * Maintains a catalog of files being backed up and their location on

    the media.

  * Does tape management: e.g. Amanda will not overwrite the wrong

    tape.

  * For a restore, tells you what tapes you need, and finds the proper

    backup image on the tape for you.

  * Supports tape changers via a generic interface.  Easily

    customizable to any type of tape library, carousel, robot,

    stacker, or virtual tape that can be controlled via the unix

    command line.

  * Device API provides a pluggable interface to storage

    devices. Bundled drivers support tapes and virtual tapes on disk,

    DVD-RW, RAIT, and Amazon S3. The bundled amvault can then copy to

    removable media for off-site (D2D2T) or cloud storage (D2D2C).

  * Supports secure communication between server and client using

    OpenSSH, allowing secure backup of machines in a DMZ or out in the

    Internet.

  * Can encrypt backup archives on Amanda client or on Amanda server

    using GPG or any encryption program.

  * Can compress backup archives before sending or after sending over

    the network, with compress, gzip or a custom program.

  * Supports Kerberos 5 security, including encrypted dumps.

  * Recovers gracefully from errors, including down or hung machines.

  * Reports results in detail, including all errors, via email.

  * Dynamically adjusts the backup schedule to keep within

    constraints: no more juggling by hand when adding disks and

    computers to your network.

  * Backup normalization: Amanda schedules full and incremental

    backups so you don't have to, and so as to spread the load across

    the backup cycle. Amanda will intelligently promote a backup level

    in case it is determines that is optimal for resources.

  * Includes a pre-run checker program, that conducts sanity checks on

    both the tape server host and all the client hosts (in parallel),

    and will send an e-mail report of any problems that could cause

    the backups to fail.

  * IPv6 friendly.

  * Runs transparently from cron as needed.

  * Span tapes, i.e. if a single backup is too large for one tape,

    Amanda will split it and put the pieces on multiple tapes

    automatically.

  * Application API allows custom backups for applications such as

    relational databases, or for special file systems.

  * Executes user-provided pre- and post-backup scripts, for,

    e.g. enforcing database referential integrity.

  * Award-winning! Including: Linux Journal Readers' Choice Award.

  * Lots of other options; Amanda is very configurable.

WHAT ARE THE SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR AMANDA?

--------------------------------------------

Amanda requires a host that has access to disks (local, NAS or SAN) or

a large capacity tape drive or library. All modern tape formats,

e.g. LTO, EXABYTE, DAT or DLT are supported. This becomes the "backup

server host".  All the computers you are going to backup are the

"backup client hosts".  The server host can also be a client host.

Amanda works best with one or more large "holding disk" partitions on

the server host available to it for buffering dumps before writing to

tape.  The holding disk allows Amanda to run backups in parallel to

the disk, only writing them to tape when the backup is finished.  Note

that the holding disk is not required: without it Amanda will run

backups sequentially to the tape drive.  Running it this way may not

be optimal for performance, but still allows you to take advantage of

Amanda's other features.

As a rule of thumb, for best performance the holding disk should be

larger than the dump output from your largest disk partitions.  For

example, if you are backing up some terabyte disks that compress down

to 500 GB, then you'll want at least 500 GB on your holding disk.  On

the other hand, if those terabyte drives are partitioned into 50 GB

filesystems, they'll probably compress down to 25 GB and you'll only

need that much on your holding disk.  Amanda will perform better with

larger holding disks.

Actually, Amanda will still work if you have full dumps that are

larger than the holding disk: Amanda will send those dumps directly to

tape one at a time.  If you have many such dumps you will be limited

by the dump speed of those machines.

WHAT SYSTEMS DOES AMANDA RUN ON?

--------------------------------

Amanda should run on any modern Unix system that supports dump or GNU

tar, has sockets and inetd (or a replacement such as xinetd), and

either system V shared memory, or BSD mmap implemented.

In particular, Amanda has been compiled, and the client side tested on

the following systems:

        AIX 3.2 and 4.1

        BSDI BSD/OS 2.1 and 3.1

        DEC OSF/1 3.2 and 4.0

        FreeBSD 6, 7 and 8

        GNU/Linux 2.6 on x86, m68k, alpha, sparc, arm and powerpc

        HP-UX 9.x and 10.x (x >= 01)

        IRIX 6.5.2 and up

        NetBSD 1.0

        Nextstep 3 (*)

        OpenBSD 2.5 x86, sparc, etc (ports available)

        Solaris 10

        Ultrix 4.2

        Mac OS X 10

        Windows: XP Pro (Server pack 2), 2003 server, Vista, 2008

                server R2, Windows 7 (*)

(*) The Amanda server side is known to run on all of the other

machines except on those marked with an asterisk.

Backup operations can be CPU and Memory intensive (e.g. for

compression and encryption operations). It is recommended that you

have a server class CPU in the backup server.

WHERE DO I GET AMANDA?

----------------------

Amanda, including its source tree, is on SourceForge:

        http://sourceforge.net/projects/amanda

Or see

        http://www.amanda.org/download.php

Most Linux distributions include amanda rpms or debian packages

pre-built for various architectures. Pre-built binaries are also

available at:

        http://www.zmanda.com/download-amanda.php

HOW DO I GET AMANDA UP AND RUNNING?

-----------------------------------

Read the file docs/INSTALL.  There are a variety of steps, from

compiling Amanda to installing it on the backup server host and the

client machines.

    docs/INSTALL        contains general installation instructions.

    docs/NEWS           details new features in each release.

You can read Amanda documentation at:

        http://www.amanda.org

and at the Amanda wiki:

        http://wiki.zmanda.com

WHO DO I TALK TO IF I HAVE A PROBLEM?

-------------------------------------

You can get Amanda help and questions answered from the mailing lists and

Amanda forums:

==> To join a mailing list, DO NOT, EVER, send mail to that list.  Send

    mail to <listname>-request@amanda.org, or amanda-lists@amanda.org,

    with the following line in the body of the message:

        subscribe <listname> <your-email-address>

    You will receive an email acknowledging your subscription. Keep

    it. Should you ever wish to depart our company, it has unsubscribe

    and other useful information.

    amanda-announce

        The amanda-announce mailing list is for important announcements

        related to the Amanda Network Backup Manager package, including new

        versions, contributions, and fixes.  NOTE: the amanda-users list is

        itself on the amanda-announce distribution, so you only need to

        subscribe to one of the two lists, not both.

        To subscribe, send a message to amanda-announce-request@amanda.org.

    amanda-users

        The amanda-users mailing list is for questions and general discussion

        about the Amanda Network Backup Manager.  NOTE: the amanda-users list

        is itself on the amanda-announce distribution, so you only need to

        subscribe to one of the two lists, not both.

        To subscribe, send a message to amanda-users-request@amanda.org.

    amanda-hackers

        The amanda-hackers mailing list is for discussion of the

        technical details of the Amanda package, including extensions,

        ports, bugs, fixes, and alpha testing of new versions.

        To subscribe, send a message to amanda-hackers-request@amanda.org.

Amanda forums: http://forums.zmanda.com

Amanda Platform Experts: http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Platform_Experts

Backup, Share and Enjoy,

The Amanda Development Team