Care-free backup with Amanda

February 17, 2010 by ofadmin

We got a question from a customer for a good backup solution. The backup software we propose the most to our customers is Amanda (The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver).
 
The feature that sold it to our customer was the setup and forget, which many of our customers love, after testing the restore of course.
 
We provided the right parameters after setting up the server, the dumpcycle (number of days), the tapecycle (number of tapes), the runspercycle (number of times the backup needs to run in the dumpcycle) and some other small modifications and you're done.
 
Schedule the backup and Amanda will decide when to do full, incremental or differential backups.
Based on the companies specific setup, we advised the client to use the virtual tape ability, something he liked a lot. It's easy to provide virtual tapes to amanda. Virtual tapes are tapes that reside on disk and not on physical tapes. Amanda mostly uses tar to create the backups.
 
Amanda provides the needed commands to manipulate the tapes and to do easy recovery.
 
You can find more information about Amanda on http://www.amanda.org.
 
Amanda also has commercial products (Zmanda cloud backup, Recovery Manager), which includes additional features.