AMANDA

AMANDA, the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, is a backup system that allows the administrator of a LAN to set up a single master backup server to back up multiple hosts 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 hosts.

Features:

• written in C, freely distributable.
• built on top of standard backup software: Unix dump/restore, GNU Tar and others.
• 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.
• supports Kerberos 4 security, including encrypted dumps. The Kerberos support is available as a separate add-on package, see the file KERBEROS.HOW-TO-GET on the ftp site, and the file docs/KERBEROS in this package, for more details.
• 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.

What is new in this release:

• Amanda-3.1.2 has a known security vulnerability, and all users should upgrade to Amanda-3.1.3 as soon as possible.

What is new in version 3.1.1:

• config
• The 'rawtapedev' keyword was removed, and the 'label_new_tapes' keyword was deprecated.
• New warnings for dangerous splitting configurations
• changer
• We have many changers implementing the new changer API. The new changers are faster, more reliable, and have many new features. One new features is that the changer keeps track of which label is in which slot, allowing it to locate a tape faster. But with some changers (new chg-multi or chg-robot without a barcode), it doesn't get automaticaly notified if you change the volume in a slot. In this case, you must notify the changer of it with the 'amtape update' command:
• amtape DailySet1 update 3-8
• amtape DailySet1 update 3-8=
• amtape DailySet1 update 3=DailySet003
• See amanda-changers(7) for more information.
• ndmp, dvdrw
• New Amanda devices - see amanda-devices(7) for more information.
• amsamba
• The default amandapass file for the amsamba application is $CONFIG_DIR/amandapass, but it is /etc/amandapass for program GNUTAR. Don't forget to move the file if you switch to the amsamba application.
• ampgsql, amsuntar, amraw
• New applications to back up PostgreSQL databases, Solaris systems, and raw device files, respectively.
• amtape
• Amtape's behavior has changed; see NEWS
• amrmtape
• Rewritten with new command-line interface; see NEWS
• amdevcheck
• New --label and --properties options give more information about device
• amreport
• New, more natural command-line interface (try 'amreport $config')

What is new in version 3.1.0:

• # config
• The 'rawtapedev' keyword was removed, and the 'label_new_tapes' keyword was deprecated.
• New warnings for dangerous splitting configurations
• # changer
• We have many changers implementing the new changer API. The new changers are faster, more reliable, and have many new features. One new features is that the changer keeps track of which label is in which slot, allowing it to locate a tape faster. But with some changers (new chg-multi or chg-robot without a barcode), it doesn't get automaticaly notified if you change the volume in a slot. In this case, you must notify the changer of it with the 'amtape update' command:
• o amtape DailySet1 update 3-8
• o amtape DailySet1 update 3-8=
• o amtape DailySet1 update 3=DailySet003
• See amanda-changers(7) for more information.
• # ndmp, dvdrw
• New Amanda devices - see amanda-devices(7) for more information.
• # amsamba
• The default amandapass file for the amsamba application is $CONFIG_DIR/amandapass, but it is /etc/amandapass for program GNUTAR. Don't forget to move the file if you switch to the amsamba application.
• # ampgsql, amsuntar, amraw
• New applications to back up PostgreSQL databases, Solaris systems, and raw device files, respectively.
• # amtape
• Amtape's behavior has changed; see NEWS
• # amrmtape
• Rewritten with new command-line interface; see NEWS
• # amdevcheck
• New --label and --properties options give more information about device
• # amreport
• New, more natural command-line interface (try 'amreport $config')

What is new in version 2.6.1p1:

• amplot: better output
• Don't include genversion.h in distribution tarballs.
• Many bugs fixed
• S3 device driver
• rait device driver
• amstatus
• configure
• application-api
• compilation on some platform
• others small bug

What is new in version 2.6.1:

• An application API allows you to easily write wrappers around any backup program (see the 'amanda-applications' man page0. amgtar now uses GNU tar, which is a lot more configurable than the GNUTAR program.
• amzfs-sendrecv performs backups of a ZFS filesystem with 'zfs send'.
• The script API now allows you to run scripts before and after the amanda process.
• amzfs-snapshot takes a snapshot of a ZFS filesystem, which can then be backed up with amgtar.

What is new in version 2.6.0p2:

• Various device API fixes.
• Fixes for compilation on various platforms.
• Other small fixes.