Hi, I'm thinking about switching to Amanda. I inherited a Bacula-based backup system (old version 3) and the server's drives are failing so I'm going to deploy a new server and am considering switching to Amanda at the same time.
My setup: I need to backup 2 linux file servers, each hostinng a RAID's, sizes ~36TB and ~28TB. The raids full yet but let's assume we'll get close to full eventually. I have a 2-drive (LTO-5), 30-tape Quantum tape library. In addition, I'll probably back up the /etc dirs of a few servers. >From what I've read, Amanda could be a better choice for me than Bacula since mine is a pretty straight-forward setup. Does that seem right? Bacula's been something of a beast for me, especially when I had a catalog meltdown and had to restore the catalog piecemeal from tape. I have a number of questions. I'll post some here, and then some in followup posts to keep it manageable. Thanks for any help! 1) I'm curious about how often amanda is updated, approximately. I see the current version was released June 2013. How about the previous release of 3.x? 2) Is it clear whether it's better to use the amanda.org mailing lists or the forums on zmanda.com? The mailing lists seem significantly slower than Bacula's. Is Amanda less widely used? Or maybe that's because there are fewer problems with Amanda? :) 3) Are multi-drive tape changers directly supported? If I run amanda and multiple clients need backing up, amanda will use both tape drives simultaneously? 4) Anyway to find out if my Quantum Scalar I-500 tape library is supported? The link on the site regarding supported tape devices is dead. It seems Amanda uses low-level tape commands, so it shouldn't be an issue? Anything to test it's compatibility? 5) Many links on the FAQ and wiki pages are dead. Is that an ongoing issue or just temporary? It doesn't bode too well for the documentation. Thanks! -Michael
