Amanda Open Source Backup Software
Amanda is the most popular open source backup and recovery software in the world. Amanda protects more than a million servers and desktops running various versions of Linux, UNIX, BSD, Mac OS-X, and Microsoft Windows operating systems worldwide.
Key Reasons for Wide Adoption of AMANDA Backup
- Amanda backup simplifies the life of a System Administrator who can easily set up a single server to back up multiple networked clients to a tape-based or disk-based storage system.
- Amanda is a 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 online 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.
- The Open Source Amanda project has a large and productive community that grows every day.
- 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 backup is very secure. Encryption on the client ensures the security of data in transit and encryption on the backup server ensures the security of data at rest, e.g, on a tape or on a Cloud. Amanda supports up to 4096-bit keys with public-key cryptography as well as 256-bit AES encryption.
- A unique scheduler optimizes the 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 the report by Coverity ).
Getting Started with Amanda
Amanda is available in various forms:
- Amanda Open Source Backup (Community Edition): Freely downloadable and used by hundreds of thousands of sites around the world. Available in binary form for most common operating systems and distributions. The source code is also available.
- Amanda Enterprise Edition: Fully supported and enhanced edition of Amanda. Includes Zmanda Management Console - a full-featured GUI for Amanda. Provides support for backing up live applications and databases.
- Zmanda Backup Appliance: A pre-configured virtual machine to backup an entire network of systems and applications, based on Amanda Enterprise.
Comparison Table Between Amanda Community and Enterprise Editions
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. A rich set of tutorials and user guides 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.
Comparison Table Between Amanda Community and Enterprise Editions
Additional Resources for Amanda Enterprise
- Demos
- Introduction to Amanda Enterprise
- Data Flow and Parallelism in Amanda Enterprise
- Amanda Enterprise Download and Installation
- Amanda Enterprise Configuration Overview (AE 3.5)
- Amanda Enterprise Oracle Agent
- Amanda Enterprise MS Exchange Agent
- Amanda Enterprise MS SQL Agent
- Power Reporting with Amanda Enterprise
- Quick Introduction to Zmanda Disaster Recovery
- Zmanda MySQL Agent for Netbackup
- Datasheets
- User Guides
- FAQ
- Success Stories
- Blog:Â Network Backup and Recovery
- Levels of support:Â Standard and Premium
- Pricing
- Compatibility Matrix:Â List of supported operating systems, databases and applications
- Coverity certification:Â Amanda passes Homeland Security Rung 2
For more information on Amanda Enterprise, please contact Zmanda Sales.