For many years, the University of Maryland (UoM) Computer Science department was the source of quality, free software that rivaled or even surpassed proprietary solutions. The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver (AMANDA), is one such solution. Although no longer supported by UoM, it is now hosted on SourceForge, where it remains in active development. In addition to the free Community edition, there is a paid Enterprise edition that includes additional features, such as a graphical configuration utility.
Originally oriented heavily towards centralized tape backup of many networked systems, it now supports disk and even cloud-based storage of backup data as well. Amanda requires a software client running on the systems to be backed up. Oients are available for most Unix type systems, as well as Mac as/X and various Windows releases. The server side will run on pretty much any Unix-or Linux-based system. This makes Amanda especially useful for large, heterogeneous sites.
Amanda uses standard tape and disk file formats, which allows standard tools, such as mt and tar, to be used to browse or even recover data if desired. Amanda provides for parallel backups of many systems at once, backup file management; restore utilities that are easy to use, and several layers of security (including encryption of the backup data over the network, and encryption of the backup files). Amanda is implemented as a single central server that communicates with multiple clients.
A discussion of Amanda configuration could take up a whole book and is very dependent on the type of backup media you use and the systems you are backing up. However, briefly, the community (free) version of Amanda must be configured manually, by adding subdirectories and configuration files to the /ete/amanda/ configuration directory. Refer to the documentation that comes with Amanda, or visit the www •amanda. org website for further information. Also, several commercially published books on backup and recovery have chapters on Amanda configuration.
