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-2.4.1p1: 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/INSTALL
for directions. You can skip the first section, as Amanda is already built. Theamanda
man page documents the default parameters used.This package contains two builds of amanda:
fw_amanda.sw.*
built with "--with-user=root --with-group=sys --without-amandahosts
", andfw_amanda.sw_amanda.*
built with "--with-user=amanda --with-group=operator --with-amandahosts
". You may install the one that best fits the needs of your site, although the later variant will require some additional setup (creating the new user and group.)The
ioconfig
(andhwgraph
) man pages explain how/etc/ioperms
can be modified to make a persistent change to device file permissions.
To auto-install this package, go back and click on the respective install icon.