1Amanda (The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver) Backup
2Software
3
4Copyright (c) 1991-1998 University of Maryland at College Park
5Copyright (c) 2007-2013 Zmanda, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
6All Rights Reserved.
7
8PLEASE NOTE: THIS SOFTWARE IS BEING MADE AVAILABLE "AS-IS". We make
9no warranties that it will work for you. As such there is no support
10available other than users helping each other on the Amanda mailing
11lists or forums. Formal support may be available through vendors.
12
13
14WHAT IS AMANDA?
15---------------
16
17Amanda is a backup system designed to backup and archive many
18computers on a network to disk, tape changer/drive or cloud storage.
19
20Here are some features of Amanda:
21
22 * Written in C and Perl.
23
24 * Freely distributable source and executable. University of Maryland
25 (BSD style) license and GPL.
26
27 * Built on top of standard backup software: Unix dump/restore, GNU
28 Tar and other archival tools. It is extensible to support new
29 archival applications.
30
31 * Open file and tape formats. If necessary, you can use standard
32 tools like mt and GNU Tar to recover data.
33
34 * Backs up 32 and 64 bit Windows machines.
35
36 * Will back up multiple machines in parallel to a holding disk. Once
37 a dump is complete, Amanda will copy finished dumps one by one to
38 virtual tape on a disk or tape as fast as it can. For example:
39
40 * A 30 GB backup to virtual tape on disk may take less than 75
41 minutes.
42
43 * A 41GB backup to AIT5 (25MB/s transfer) may take 40 minutes of
44 tape time.
45
46 * Maintains a catalog of files being backed up and their location on
47 the media.
48
49 * Does tape management: e.g. Amanda will not overwrite the wrong
50 tape.
51
52 * For a restore, tells you what tapes you need, and finds the proper
53 backup image on the tape for you.
54
55 * Supports tape changers via a generic interface. Easily
56 customizable to any type of tape library, carousel, robot,
57 stacker, or virtual tape that can be controlled via the unix
58 command line.
59
60 * Device API provides a pluggable interface to storage
61 devices. Bundled drivers support tapes and virtual tapes on disk,
62 DVD-RW, RAIT, and Amazon S3. The bundled amvault can then copy to
63 removable media for off-site (D2D2T) or cloud storage (D2D2C).
64
65 * Supports secure communication between server and client using
66 OpenSSH, allowing secure backup of machines in a DMZ or out in the
67 Internet.
68
69 * Can encrypt backup archives on Amanda client or on Amanda server
70 using GPG or any encryption program.
71
72 * Can compress backup archives before sending or after sending over
73 the network, with compress, gzip or a custom program.
74
75 * Supports Kerberos 5 security, including encrypted dumps.
76
77 * Recovers gracefully from errors, including down or hung machines.
78
79 * Reports results in detail, including all errors, via email.
80
81 * Dynamically adjusts the backup schedule to keep within
82 constraints: no more juggling by hand when adding disks and
83 computers to your network.
84
85 * Backup normalization: Amanda schedules full and incremental
86 backups so you don't have to, and so as to spread the load across
87 the backup cycle. Amanda will intelligently promote a backup level
88 in case it is determines that is optimal for resources.
89
90 * Includes a pre-run checker program, that conducts sanity checks on
91 both the tape server host and all the client hosts (in parallel),
92 and will send an e-mail report of any problems that could cause
93 the backups to fail.
94
95 * IPv6 friendly.
96
97 * Runs transparently from cron as needed.
98
99 * Span tapes, i.e. if a single backup is too large for one tape,
100 Amanda will split it and put the pieces on multiple tapes
101 automatically.
102
103 * Application API allows custom backups for applications such as
104 relational databases, or for special file systems.
105
106 * Executes user-provided pre- and post-backup scripts, for,
107 e.g. enforcing database referential integrity.
108
109 * Award-winning! Including: Linux Journal Readers' Choice Award.
110
111 * Lots of other options; Amanda is very configurable.
112
113WHAT ARE THE SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR AMANDA?
114--------------------------------------------
115
116Amanda requires a host that has access to disks (local, NAS or SAN) or
117a large capacity tape drive or library. All modern tape formats,
118e.g. LTO, EXABYTE, DAT or DLT are supported. This becomes the "backup
119server host". All the computers you are going to backup are the
120"backup client hosts". The server host can also be a client host.
121
122Amanda works best with one or more large "holding disk" partitions on
123the server host available to it for buffering dumps before writing to
124tape. The holding disk allows Amanda to run backups in parallel to
125the disk, only writing them to tape when the backup is finished. Note
126that the holding disk is not required: without it Amanda will run
127backups sequentially to the tape drive. Running it this way may not
128be optimal for performance, but still allows you to take advantage of
129Amanda's other features.
130
131As a rule of thumb, for best performance the holding disk should be
132larger than the dump output from your largest disk partitions. For
133example, if you are backing up some terabyte disks that compress down
134to 500 GB, then you'll want at least 500 GB on your holding disk. On
135the other hand, if those terabyte drives are partitioned into 50 GB
136filesystems, they'll probably compress down to 25 GB and you'll only
137need that much on your holding disk. Amanda will perform better with
138larger holding disks.
139
140Actually, Amanda will still work if you have full dumps that are
141larger than the holding disk: Amanda will send those dumps directly to
142tape one at a time. If you have many such dumps you will be limited
143by the dump speed of those machines.
144
145
146WHAT SYSTEMS DOES AMANDA RUN ON?
147--------------------------------
148
149Amanda should run on any modern Unix system that supports dump or GNU
150tar, has sockets and inetd (or a replacement such as xinetd), and
151either system V shared memory, or BSD mmap implemented.
152
153In particular, Amanda has been compiled, and the client side tested on
154the following systems:
155
156 AIX 3.2 and 4.1
157 BSDI BSD/OS 2.1 and 3.1
158 DEC OSF/1 3.2 and 4.0
159 FreeBSD 6, 7 and 8
160 GNU/Linux 2.6 on x86, m68k, alpha, sparc, arm and powerpc
161 HP-UX 9.x and 10.x (x >= 01)
162 IRIX 6.5.2 and up
163 NetBSD 1.0
164 Nextstep 3 (*)
165 OpenBSD 2.5 x86, sparc, etc (ports available)
166 Solaris 10
167 Ultrix 4.2
168 Mac OS X 10
169 Windows: XP Pro (Server pack 2), 2003 server, Vista, 2008
170 server R2, Windows 7 (*)
171
172(*) The Amanda server side is known to run on all of the other
173machines except on those marked with an asterisk.
174
175Backup operations can be CPU and Memory intensive (e.g. for
176compression and encryption operations). It is recommended that you
177have a server class CPU in the backup server.
178
179
180WHERE DO I GET AMANDA?
181----------------------
182
183Amanda, including its source tree, is on SourceForge:
184
185 http://sourceforge.net/projects/amanda
186
187Or see
188 http://www.amanda.org/download.php
189
190Most Linux distributions include amanda rpms or debian packages
191pre-built for various architectures. Pre-built binaries are also
192available at:
193
194 http://www.zmanda.com/download-amanda.php
195
196HOW DO I GET AMANDA UP AND RUNNING?
197-----------------------------------
198
199Read the file docs/INSTALL. There are a variety of steps, from
200compiling Amanda to installing it on the backup server host and the
201client machines.
202
203 docs/INSTALL contains general installation instructions.
204 docs/NEWS details new features in each release.
205
206You can read Amanda documentation at:
207
208 http://www.amanda.org
209
210and at the Amanda wiki:
211
212 http://wiki.zmanda.com
213
214WHO DO I TALK TO IF I HAVE A PROBLEM?
215-------------------------------------
216
217You can get Amanda help and questions answered from the mailing lists and
218Amanda forums:
219
220==> To join a mailing list, DO NOT, EVER, send mail to that list. Send
221 mail to <listname>-request@amanda.org, or amanda-lists@amanda.org,
222 with the following line in the body of the message:
223 subscribe <listname> <your-email-address>
224
225 You will receive an email acknowledging your subscription. Keep
226 it. Should you ever wish to depart our company, it has unsubscribe
227 and other useful information.
228
229 amanda-announce
230 The amanda-announce mailing list is for important announcements
231 related to the Amanda Network Backup Manager package, including new
232 versions, contributions, and fixes. NOTE: the amanda-users list is
233 itself on the amanda-announce distribution, so you only need to
234 subscribe to one of the two lists, not both.
235 To subscribe, send a message to amanda-announce-request@amanda.org.
236
237 amanda-users
238 The amanda-users mailing list is for questions and general discussion
239 about the Amanda Network Backup Manager. NOTE: the amanda-users list
240 is itself on the amanda-announce distribution, so you only need to
241 subscribe to one of the two lists, not both.
242 To subscribe, send a message to amanda-users-request@amanda.org.
243
244 amanda-hackers
245 The amanda-hackers mailing list is for discussion of the
246 technical details of the Amanda package, including extensions,
247 ports, bugs, fixes, and alpha testing of new versions.
248 To subscribe, send a message to amanda-hackers-request@amanda.org.
249
250Amanda forums: http://forums.zmanda.com
251
252Amanda Platform Experts: http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Platform_Experts
253
254Backup, Share and Enjoy,
255The Amanda Development Team
256