This is a release of Amanda, the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver. Amanda is a backup system designed to archive many computers on a network to a single large-capacity tape drive. Amanda uses native dump and/or GNU tar facilities and can back up a large number of workstations running multiple versions of UNIX. Recent versions can also use SAMBA to back up Microsoft Windows 95/NT hosts. Here are some features of Amanda:
amanda-2.4.2p2: description + notes
- will back up multiple machines in parallel to a holding disk, blasting finished dumps one by one to tape as fast as we can write files to tape. For example, a ~2 Gb 8mm tape on a ~240K/s interface to a host with a large holding disk can be filled by Amanda in under 4 hours.
- does simple tape management: will not overwrite the wrong tape.
- supports tape changers via a generic interface. Easily customizable to any type of tape carousel, robot, or stacker that can be controlled via the unix command line.
- for a restore, tells you what tapes you need, and finds the proper backup image on the tape for you.
- recovers gracefully from errors, including down or hung machines.
- reports results, including all errors in detail, in email.
- will dynamically adjust backup schedule to keep within constraints: no more juggling by hand when adding disks and computers to network.
- 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.
- can compress dumps before sending or after sending over the net, with either compress or gzip.
- can optionally synchronize with external backups, for those large timesharing computers where you want to do full dumps when the system is down in single-user mode (since BSD dump is not reliable on active filesystems): Amanda will still do your daily dumps.
- lots of other options; Amanda is very configurable.
You will need to setup your Amanda configuration before it can be used: see
/usr/freeware/doc/amanda/INSTALLfor directions. You can skip the first section, as Amanda is already built. Theamandaman page documents the default parameters used.If you intend to setup an "
amanda" user account you should install thefw_amanda.sw_amandasubsystems rather than the defaultfw_amanda.swfiles. Both sets have the Samba 2.0.6 error message and advfs file system patches applied.
To auto-install this package, go back and click on the respective install icon.