Amanda: Open Source Backup

The Key Reasons for Wide Adoption of Amanda are:

• Amanda simplifies the life of a System Administrator who can easily set up a single server to back up multiple networked clients to a tape- or disk-based storage system.
• Amanda is well documented and can be set up very rapidly.
• Amanda provides the unique capability of writing backups to tape and disk simultaneously. The very same data could be available on-line for quick restores from a disk and off-site for disaster recovery and long-term retention.
• Since Amanda does not use proprietary device drivers, any device supported by an operating system works well with Amanda. The System Administrator does not have to worry about breaking support for a device when upgrading Amanda.
• Amanda uses native dump and/or GNU tar utilities. Since there are no proprietary formats, in case of emergency, data could be recovered with native utilities, regardless of whether or not Amanda is still installed.
• Amanda is very secure. Encryption on a client ensures security of data in transit and encryption on a backup server ensures security of data at rest, e.g. on a tape.
• A unique scheduler optimizes backup level for different clients in such a way that total backup time is about the same for every backup run. Amanda frees the System Administrators from having to guess the rate of data change in their environments.

• Amanda is stable and robust because of high quality code (see report by Coverity).
• The Open Source Amanda project has a large and productive Community that grows every day.

Documentation, Discussion Forums, and Mailing List Archive

Amanda documentation written by users for users is available at the Amanda wiki. Please use Forums for discussions about Amanda and backup and recovery in general. There are several searchable mailing lists archives available. A rich set of tutorials and whitepapers are available on the Zmanda Network (free registration).

Amanda Best Practices

• When Bad Things Happen to Good Amanda Backup Servers. This white paper describes methods of devising a multi-layered protection to the Amanda backup server by using Amanda backups and the standard operating systems tool rsync.
• Secure Network Backups in a Heterogeneous Environment in the Time it Takes to Have Pizza Delivered. How to install and configure a secure, heterogeneous network backup, verify the configurations and start a backup in less than 15 minutes.
• Configuring Amanda for parallel backups. If you have multiple clients you can significantly improve Amanda performance by running backups in parallel.
• Top considerations for implementing secure backup and recovery Your backup is a copy of your most valuable digital assets. Learn about best practices for ensuring security of your backup data.