AMANDA: 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. It is built on top of
standard backup software: Unix dump/restore, GNU Tar and others, so it
is possible to restore from a backup tape even if AMANDA is not
installed.
AMANDA requires a host that is mostly idle during the time backups are
done, with a large capacity tape drive (e.g. an EXABYTE, DAT or DLT
tape). This becomes the "tape server host". All the computers you are
going to dump are the "backup client hosts". The server host can also
be a client host.
Other features include:
* 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 GPG encrypted archives.
* 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.
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