1. Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver (Server) Amanda is a backup system designed to archive many computers on a network to a single large-capacity tape drive. This package is suitable for large amounts of data to backup. For smaller solutions take a look at afbackup, tob, taper, ... Features: * 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. * built on top of standard backup software: Unix dump/restore, and later GNU Tar and others. * 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. * 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 to operators. * 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. For a quick start read the README.server.debian in /usr/share/doc/amanda. Explanation of suggested programs: - perl is needed for some non essential server utilities - awk and gnuplot are needed for plotting statistics of backups - to backup the tape server, you need to install the client too - /usr/bin/Mail from mailx is used by amcheck to mail info about which tape is needed next, etc From Debian 3.0r0 APT