In attached version:
I scanned the list for comments after Charles' posting, and I think I
got everything in this version.
Overall, I got rid of redundant/unnecessary stuff, cleaned up some
language, and added some things that were missing.
I would also suggest that we make this file available on
SourceForge/Amanda as a standalone .txt file download.
Happy Holidays!
Jean-Louis Martineau wrote:
Hi Charles,
Thanks for the good work. I have a few comments:
* Written in C.
should be:
* Written in C and perl
* Supports Kerberos 4 and 5 security, including encrypted dumps.
should be:
* Supports Kerberos 5 security, including encrypted dumps.
Kerboros 4 is no longer supported.
* Full backup acceleration: if Amanda calculates it has the tape
space available it will make full backups early. This uses tapes
more efficiently and reduces the number of tapes necessary for a
restore.
That's not completely true, amanda try to balance the size of full
dump at each days.
amanda promote DLE only if today's full size is smaller than
(all dles full size / runspercycle) and all scheduled backup fits on
tapes.
Jean-Louis
Charles Curley wrote:
I'm attaching the last draft of the README. Dustin, you are welcome to
commit it; it is at least an improvement.
But I am left with a few questions...
HP-UX is up to version 11; should we include that?
I got responses on the versions of three systems (FreeBSD, Solaris,
Windows) and edited the Linux version myself. But I got no feedback
on others. If you work with one of the others, please check. Or maybe
we should consider dropping some of these. E.g.: Linux on Alpha is
probably moot.
I used two examples of typical speeds some folks provided. I think I
can collate all of them for the wiki, but not immediately.
I added a reference to the Amanda Platform Experts:
http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Platform_Experts. Platform Experts
might see that their entry is current.
My thanks to everyone for the feedback. It made for a much better
document.
Amanda (The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver) Backup Software
Copyright (c) 1991-1998 University of Maryland at College Park
All Rights Reserved.
PLEASE NOTE: THIS SOFTWARE IS BEING MADE AVAILABLE "AS-IS".
We make no warranties that it will work for you. As such there
is no support available other than users helping each other on the
Amanda mailing lists or forums. Formal support may be available through
vendors.
WHAT IS AMANDA?
---------------
Amanda is a backup system designed to backup and archive many
computers on a network to disk, tape changer/drive or cloud storage.
Here are some features of Amanda:
* Written in C and Perl.
* Freely distributable source and executable. University of
Maryland (BSD style) license and GPL.
* Built on top of standard backup software: Unix dump/restore, GNU Tar
and other archival tools. It is extensible to support new archival
applications.
* Open file and tape formats. If necessary, you can use standard tools like
mt and GNU Tar to recover data.
* Backs up 32 and 64 bit Windows machines.
* Will back up multiple machines in parallel to a holding disk. Once
a dump is complete, Amanda will copy finished dumps one by one to
virtual tape on a disk or tape as fast as it can. For example:
* A 30 GB backup to virtual tape on disk may take less than 75
minutes.
* A 41GB backup to AIT5 (25MB/s transfer) may take 40 minutes of
tape time.
* Maintains a catalog of files being backed up and their location on
the media.
* Does tape management: e.g. Amanda will not overwrite the wrong tape.
* For a restore, tells you what tapes you need, and finds the proper
backup image on the tape for you.
* Supports tape changers via a generic interface. Easily
customizable to any type of tape library, carousel, robot, stacker, or
virtual tape that can be controlled via the unix command line.
* Device API provides a pluggable interface to storage
devices. Bundled drivers support tapes and virtual tapes on disk,
DVD-RW, RAIT, and Amazon S3. The bundled amvault can then copy to
removable media for off-site (D2D2T) or cloud storage (D2D2C).
* Supports secure communication between server and client using
OpenSSH, allowing secure backup of machines in a DMZ or out in the
Internet.
* Can encrypt backup archives on Amanda client or on Amanda server using GPG
or any encryption program.
* Can compress backup archives before sending or after sending over the
network,
with compress, gzip or a custom program.
* Supports Kerberos 5 security, including encrypted dumps.
* Recovers gracefully from errors, including down or hung machines.
* Reports results in detail, including all errors, via email.
* Dynamically adjusts the backup schedule to keep within
constraints: no more juggling by hand when adding disks and
computers to your network.
* Backup normalization: Amanda schedules full and incremental backups so you
don't
have to, and so as to spread the load across the backup cycle. Amanda
will intelligently promote a backup level in case it is determines
that is optimal for resources.
* 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.
* IPv6 friendly.
* Runs transparently from cron as needed.
* Span tapes, i.e. if a single backup is too large for one tape,
Amanda will split it and put the pieces on multiple tapes automatically.
* Application API allows custom backups for applications
such as relational databases, or for special file systems.
* Executes user-provided pre- and post-backup scripts, for,
e.g. enforcing database referential integrity.
* Award-winning! Including: Linux Journal Readers' Choice Award.
* Lots of other options; Amanda is very configurable.
WHAT ARE THE SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR AMANDA?
--------------------------------------------
Amanda requires a host that has access to disks (local, NAS or SAN) or a
large capacity tape drive or library. All modern tape formats, e.g. LTO,
EXABYTE, DAT or
DLT are supported. This becomes the "backup server host". All the computers
you are going to backup
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 may not be optimal for 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 terabyte disks that compress
down to 500 GB, then you'll want at least 500 GB on your holding disk.
On the other hand, if those terabyte drives are partitioned into 50
GB filesystems, they'll probably compress down to 25 GB 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.
WHAT SYSTEMS DOES AMANDA RUN ON?
--------------------------------
Amanda should run on any modern Unix system that supports dump or GNU
tar, has sockets and inetd (or a replacement such as xinetd), and
either system V shared memory, or BSD mmap implemented.
In particular, Amanda 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 6, 7 and 8
GNU/Linux 2.6 on x86, m68k, alpha, sparc, arm and powerpc
HP-UX 9.x and 10.x (x >= 01)
IRIX 6.5.2 and up
NetBSD 1.0
Nextstep 3 (*)
OpenBSD 2.5 x86, sparc, etc (ports available)
Solaris 10
Ultrix 4.2
Mac OS X 10
Windows: XP Pro (Server pack 2), 2003 server, Vista, 2008
server R2, Windows 7 (*)
(*) The Amanda server side is known to run on all of the other
machines except on those marked with an asterisk.
Backup operations can be CPU and Memory intensive (e.g. for compression and
encryption operations). It is recommended that you have a server class CPU in
the backup server.
WHERE DO I GET AMANDA?
----------------------
Amanda, including its source tree, is on SourceForge:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/amanda
Or see
http://www.amanda.org/download.php
Most Linux distributions include amanda rpms or debian packages
pre-built for various architectures. Pre-built binaries are also available at:
http://www.zmanda.com/download-amanda.php
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 backup server host and the client machines.
docs/INSTALL contains general installation instructions.
docs/NEWS details new features in each release.
You can read Amanda documentation at:
http://www.amanda.org
and at the Amanda wiki:
http://wiki.zmanda.com
WHO DO I TALK TO IF I HAVE A PROBLEM?
-------------------------------------
You can get Amanda help and questions answered from the mailing lists and
Amanda forums:
==> To join a mailing list, DO NOT, EVER, send mail to that list. Send
mail to <listname>[email protected], or [email protected],
with the following line in the body of the message:
subscribe <listname> <your-email-address>
You will receive an email acknowledging your subscription. Keep
it. Should you ever wish to depart our company, it has unsubscribe
and other useful information.
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 [email protected].
amanda-users
The amanda-users mailing list is for questions and general discussion
about the Amanda Network Backup Manager. 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 [email protected].
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 [email protected].
Amanda forums: http://forums.zmanda.com
Amanda Platform Experts: http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Platform_Experts
Backup, Share and Enjoy,
The Amanda Development Team
