1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
|
Amanda, The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver
Copyright (c) 1991-1998 University of Maryland at College Park
All Rights Reserved.
See the files COPYRIGHT, COPYRIGHT-REGEX and COPYRIGHT-APACHE for
distribution conditions and official warranty disclaimer.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS SOFTWARE IS BEING MADE AVAILABLE ``AS-IS''. UMD is making
this work available so that other people can use it. This software is in
production use at our home site - the UMCP Department of Computer Science -
but we make no warranties that it will work for you. Amanda development is
unfunded - the development team maintains the code in their spare time. As a
result, there is no support available other than users helping each other on
the Amanda mailing lists. See below for information on the mailing lists.
WHAT IS AMANDA?
---------------
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.
Here are some features of Amanda:
* 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 ARE THE SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR AMANDA?
--------------------------------------------
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.
Amanda works best with one or more large "holding disk" partitions on the
server host available to it for buffering dumps before writing to tape.
The holding disk allows Amanda to run backups in parallel to the disk, only
writing them to tape when the backup is finished. Note that the holding
disk is not required: without it Amanda will run backups sequentially to
the tape drive. Running it this way kills the great performance, but still
allows you to take advantage of Amanda's other features.
As a rule of thumb, for best performance the holding disk should be larger
than the dump output from your largest disk partitions. For example, if
you are backing up some full gigabyte disks that compress down to 500 MB,
then you'll want 500 MB on your holding disk. On the other hand, if those
gigabyte drives are partitioned into 500 MB filesystems, they'll probably
compress down to 250 MB and you'll only need that much on your holding
disk. Amanda will perform better with larger holding disks.
Actually, Amanda will still work if you have full dumps that are larger
than the holding disk: Amanda will send those dumps directly to tape one at
a time. If you have many such dumps you will be limited by the dump speed
of those machines.
Amanda does not yet support single backup images larger than a tape.
WHAT SYSTEMS DOES AMANDA RUN ON?
--------------------------------
Amanda should run on any modern Unix system that supports dump or GNU
tar, has sockets and inetd, and either system V shared memory, or BSD
mmap implemented.
In particular, Amanda 2.4.1p1 has been compiled, and the client side tested
on the following systems:
AIX 3.2 and 4.1
BSDI BSD/OS 2.1 and 3.1
DEC OSF/1 3.2 and 4.0
FreeBSD 2.2.5
IRIX 5.2 and 6.3
GNU/Linux on x86, alpha, sparc, arm and powerpc
NetBSD 1.0
Nextstep 3 (*)
OpenBSD 2.5 x86, sparc, etc (ports available)
SunOS 4.1.x (x >= 1) and 5.[567]
Ultrix 4.2
HP-UX 9.x and 10.x (x >= 01)
The Amanda 2.4.1p1 server side is known to run on all of the other
machines except on those marked with an asterisk.
If you know of any system that is not listed here on which amanda
builds successfully, either client&server or client-only, please
report to amanda-hackers@amanda.org.
WHERE DO I GET AMANDA?
----------------------
There are several versions of Amanda. The latest version at the time
of this writing is available at:
ftp://ftp.amanda.org/pub/amanda
HOW DO I GET AMANDA UP AND RUNNING?
-----------------------------------
Read the file docs/INSTALL. There are a variety of steps, from compiling
Amanda to installing it on the tape server host and the client machines.
docs/INSTALL contains general installation instructions.
docs/SYSTEM.NOTES contains system-specific information.
docs/FAQ contains answers to frequently asked questions.
docs/KERBEROS explains installation under Kerberos 4.
docs/TAPE.CHANGERS explains how to customize the changer interface.
docs/WHATS.NEW details new features.
WHO DO I TALK TO IF I HAVE A PROBLEM?
-------------------------------------
Amanda is completely unsupported and made available as-is. However,
you may be able to get useful information in the Amanda mailing lists:
==> To join a mailing list, DO NOT, EVER, send mail to that list. Send
mail to <listname>-request@amanda.org, or amanda-lists@amanda.org,
with the following line in the body of the message:
subscribe <listname> <your-email-address>
amanda-announce
The amanda-announce mailing list is for important announcements
related to the Amanda Network Backup Manager package, including new
versions, contributions, and fixes. NOTE: the amanda-users list is
itself on the amanda-announce distribution, so you only need to
subscribe to one of the two lists, not both.
To subscribe, send a message to amanda-announce-request@amanda.org.
amanda-users
The amanda-users mailing list is for questions and general discussion
about the Amanda Network Backup Manager. This package and related
files are available via anonymous FTP from ftp.amanda.org in the
pub/amanda directory. NOTE: the amanda-users list is itself on the
amanda-announce distribution, so you only need to subscribe to one of
the two lists, not both.
To subscribe, send a message to amanda-users-request@amanda.org.
amanda-hackers
The amanda-hackers mailing list is for discussion of the
technical details of the Amanda package, including extensions,
ports, bugs, fixes, and alpha testing of new versions.
To subscribe, send a message to amanda-hackers-request@amanda.org.
Share and Enjoy,
The Amanda Development Team
|
