Slashdot Mirror

http://www.zmanda.com/company.html

"Zmanda: The Leader in Open Source Backup
Proven, Cost-Effective Open Source Backup and Recovery

Zmanda is the world’s leading provider of open source backup and recovery software. Our open source development and distribution model enables us to deliver the highest quality backup software such as Amanda Enterprise and Zmanda Recovery Manager for MySQL at a fraction of the cost of software from proprietary vendors. Our simple-to-use yet feature-rich backup software is complemented by top-notch services and support expected by enterprise customers."

http://www.amanda.org
"Amanda Network Backup
Open Source. Open Formats. Open APIs.
What is Amanda?

AMANDA, the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, is a backup solution that allows the IT administrator to set up a single master backup server to back up multiple hosts over network to tape drives/changers or disks or optical media. Amanda uses native utilities and formats (e.g. dump and/or GNU tar) and can back up a large number of servers and workstations running multiple versions of Linux or Unix. Amanda uses a native Windows client to back up Microsoft Windows desktops and servers.

The most recent stable release is version 3.3.7p1, released on February 15, 2015. "

I have two systems I use.

For my servers, I use AMANDA with encrypted virtual tapes to do nightly backups. Shortly after the backups run, cron calls a shell script in order to copy the virtual tapes to an offsite location via rsync.

For my desktop PC, I don't need to back up as often, so I do a weekly backup via Windows Backup to a TrueCrypt volume on an external hard drive. When it's not being used to back up my PC, I keep the external hard drive at my office. I figure if something happens where both my office and home are destroyed, then at that moment I've got bigger problems to worry about than my data. :-)

Just my $.02...

So if your main database drive fails two minutes after you wipe Friday's backup drive, all you have in your possession is a week's worth of incremental backups against a full backup that no longer exists. Gotcha. I think I'll stick with Amanda feeding into a stack of DLTs, thanks.

You will have the exact same problem with tapes using the same pattern, and you can tell AMANDA to do exactly that same pattern and it will happily comply.

The problem is solved by adding a "weekly" rotation to the hard drives, so that the full backup overwrites a four-week old full backup. You then have 4 "daily" drives and 4 "weekly" drives, and at any given moment you can restore any of the past 5 business days or to the time the weekly backup was done up to 3 weeks ago. You can trivially add more drives to the rotation to allow you to restore to whatever point in time that you want.

By the way, if hard drives are so bad for use as backup targets, then why does AMANDA (which you seem to be in religious awe of, despite not knowing it's an acronym) support backing up to them?

A better question is... do they run AMANDA?

Based on this story, probably not.

http://www.amanda.org/

Amanda is very good for backups across various *nix systems. I'm running it on Solaris, CentOS, RHEL, Fedora, and Ubuntu machines at various locations. There's a bit of administrative overhead in the initial setup, but it's bullet proof once you have it running. Combine it with a large disk array and some software VTL and you have a backup system that requires basically zero overhead.

Amanda

http://www.amanda.org/

Does the trick for my organization.

Ouch! I think I'd have wanted to strangle the IT guy for that lack of attention to detail. But, OTOH, amanda could have saved the day too. Go see http://www.amanda.org/, I do a small amount of support on their mailing list, the simpler stuff that I can answer. And I run it here at home. I also wrote some wrapper scripts for it that make sure the indices and configs in use that made that tape, are also on that tape, so a bare metal recovery can be done. And this is something that you can do if your machine has room for another large, but not fast drive. They last longer, seems like the 7200 rpm models are the best at that, the 5400's are too cheap.. Amanda can use a virtual tape, a directory on a hard drive, and I have a 200GB with 180GB of it setup as 21 virtual tapes here. So my 3 machines are fairly well covered since I also rsync the important stuff nightly before amanda runs. People who visit usually ask whats that blue cable strung overhead from the house to my little shop building. Its a piece of cat5, been hanging out in the weather now for 3 years. It runs to the box that runs my milling machine when I've got time to carve parts with it.

Anyway, hopefully reinventing what you lost won't take as long because you'll remember how you did it the first time. Good luck.

The Amost-Retired handle comes from my situation, I've retired now, I was the CE at WDTV, http://www.wdtv.com/, since 1984, but locally I'm regarded somewhat as a Grand Master, so I still get sent here and there to 'put out fires' because they know it will get done. But I'm also tiring of that scene since I'll be 72 next week. I haven't caught up on my fishing yet either, and I have it on good authority that God doesn't count the time you spend fishing against your alloted time here. :-) With good weather, I'll be on the water again today for a few hours. That might mean there won't be any real progress on a room remodeling we're in the middle of (honeydo's, you've heard of them), but that will either get done or I'll fall over (shrug). It would be a lot easier done, but there should be a law that says 2 packrats can't marry. We need to have a 3 month long yard sale, and goto the dump with what don't sell. Its amazing the amount of stuff 2 people can get attached to.

--
Cheers, Gene

Where do you get that you don't have any way of testing that the backup works? That's flat out wrong. Amanda provides tools for browsing backups, performing partial restores and more.

http://www.amanda.org/docs/amrecover.8.html

Sounds like the same thing that AMANDA has been doing since 1997.

What is old is new again.

It's a shame that they didn't include backing up to DVD or disk. Yes, you can use the disk holding area and manually clean it out periodically so it doesn't fill up. That's what I do.
why don't you use vtapes?

No this isn't a fork. The post linked to zmanda, but you can find the old logo and a reference to 2.5.0 at http://www.amanda.org/ as usual. (I had no idea anyone actually liked that logo. Ten minutes with an image editor ten years ago, and it's still up there) Amanda, as always, has been developed by whoever was willing to pick up the ball and run with it. Right now Zmanda is taking an active interest and contributing heavily back to the open source program. This is of course A Good Thing.

You are right about the fact that you have a reasonable network backup possibilities if you care enough. I managed to setup an automatic backup of all of my machines at work using http://www.amanda.org/.

But my home workstation is another story. I don't pay for any dedicated backup server so I end with making backups on DVDs. I can easily backup some stuff that is well organized but the rest is a bit problematic ;).
And what if your system died for some reason? Will you be able to recover it? What if it stopped booting?

Actually, there is a good system for it (at least from my perspective) -- http://www.mondorescue.org/ but I had problems to set it up correctly on Ubuntu. I'd really appreciate something with similar capabilities but tailored (and granted to work) for Ubuntu... possibly even with a graphical interface which would allow to easily define included and excluded regions to backup.

Besides that -- simple ubuntu-native backup would be clearly beneficial for less skilled users. I guess they now solve the problem by not doing any backups at all ;). Maybe some of them use k3b to occasionaly burn some of their most important documents.

If you have knowledgable IT, Amanda is nice--it will let you spend money on a nice tape changer and media, rather than expensive backup software that is often flakier than Amanda. If you don't have knowledgable IT, I'd actually say the next-best would be to out-source the backups.

What about amanda (http://www.amanda.org/)? Just use any old 486+ over an internal network & put it in a Faraday cage or something (so magnetic fields from storms don't get to it)

To this day my wife gives me a look when I tell her I need to work on AMANDA.

Has anyone had direct experience using Amanda under OS X? I know of windows support & assume that, at the very least, samba could be a work-around. I'm particularly interested in a native approach, as discussed here, but wanted to know whether more people had tried (and succeeded!).

I am looking for a cross-platform backup solution, but the per-seat charges on all proprietary solutions are a bit prohibitive (the hardware was hard enough to obtain!).

At work I use amanda and hfstar to back up my PowerMac G5 using our amanda backup server (which also handles our Solaris and Linux boxes). It works pretty well, although it takes some work to set up.

If you've already got amanda set up for other machines, it's not too much work to add a Mac OS X box to your amanda setup.

If you only have one machine which you want to back up, then amanda is overkill.

The two problems are fast-changing directories (e.g. /home) and rootkits that trojans that are present when creating the backup.

Those are solved by:
1) As part of the install, create a system image, excluding the fast-changing directories (e.g. /home, /var/www) after the site-specific configuration changes have been made.
2) Make backups of the fast-changing directories at regular intervals.

tar is not the only utility for backups and imaging. (Tape ARchive was originally not for backups and imaging; even the GNU-on-steroids tar poorly handles simple errors in the archive by terminating restore.)
You have dump/restore (though still broken on Linux?), dd, amanda (runs on several UNIX and GNU/Linux flavors), Mondo Rescue (the Linux-specific, practically automated drive imager), and g4u (dd dressed up in pretty scripts). (The Mondo Rescue also has a compare facility to check system integrity from the image CD.)

I currently use Bacula as my open source backup solution. Clients are available for Windows, Linux and Unix although I believe the server works best with Linux or Unix. It supports most hardware, including some tape robots (something that would be useful for 1TB of data!) and appears to be extremely flexible. It's done everything I've asked of it and more without complaint. Best of all the support from the author via. the project mailing list is second to none. The interface is through a console application although there's also a UI available (still a work in progress). There's also Amanda, you might want to look at that too.

Don't play around with something "cool" like a distributed RAID disk. Just spend the money on a decent tape drive and tapes, design a tape backup rotation strategy, get a safety deposit box at a local (or not-so-local) bank for off-site storage, and set up Amanda to do the backups.

That's what we settled on. The entire rest of our world is Apple PowerBooks, iBooks and Gentoo boxen (except the internal web server -- it's an old RedHat machine).

We tried and tried and tried all the other IMAP servers, since we had to support Outlook XP, only UW-IMAP seemed to work with TLS and Outlook.

I would not want to run Gentoo on my mailserver. I want fast, fire and forget. I love Gentoo and OS X on my G4 PowerBook, on my desktop and even in the server and testbed farms.

Not email.

Not for a while.

Good backup systems like Amanda already exist - I'm guessing that the reason that the FSF people don't have backups is because they're relying upon donations to buy backup servers/tape drives, etc. (Yes that was a subtle plea to donate them cash ;)

On this breakin I have only two comments:

1. Why not use proftpd, wu-ftpd has traditionally been prone to attacks. (Granted its a little bit more secure after each one is discovered and patched, but after so many its hard to trust it).

2. Why use MD5 sums? I use GPG signatures on all my software - forging signatures is .. non-trivial.

"Now, MAYBE gnu will decide to write a GOOD automated backup system for no other reason than keeping their junk together. (and don't give me that tar crap. I know perfectly well what it's capable of. I want an OSS equiv to NetBackup)"

Does it HAVE to be GNU, or just free to use and modify?

Check out Amanda. It's free, it works well, and it's mighty powerful.

Be aware that at its core, it uses gtar--just like NetBackup does.

Amanda is busy backing up to my big 9-inch.

Wait, are we talking about a chick here? Never mind. How embarrassing!

Wow, I didn't know The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver had that feature.

Has anybody experiences with Bacula? An NT client is available, the server side is on **ix.

Just found it today, so I can't give any comments, but at least their claim is cool:

"It comes by night and sucks the vital essence from your computers." :-)

Especially interesting would ba a comparison to Amanda.

Bye egghat.

... seen the commercials?

All this sex.com "controversy" makes me wanna take a few extra-strength Motrins... /me mutters something and gets back to making amanda load stuff into the proper slot and receiving dumps from clients

[ you know... amanda :) ]

Some people have already mentioned Amanda.

In addition to amanda, I have good luck with star coded by Jörg Schilling. star is very feature-rich, fast, standards compliant and has been around since 1985. Give it a try!

The star-users mailing list is here . You can also look at the man page and finally download it

I have been extremely happy with Amanda. Single centralised backup server running amanda-server. Multiple workstations running the amanda-client. Amanda automagically schedules backups based on sensible heuristics. I just tell Amanda how many tapes I have, how many workstations I have, and Amanda does all the hard work of working out how much tape capacity is required and how often it should schedule incrementals/fulls.

The server/client protocol has been designed to avoid reliance on dangerous security holes like rsh. The server sends the client a "send me your dump" message. The client then connects back to the server and delivers it the output from dump or tar. You can configure exclusion lists on the client if you're worried about sending certain files or filesystems. You can also encrypt the data stream and/or use Kerberos for authentication.

If I forget to load a blank tape then Amanda plays it safe. It doesn't overwrite last night's backup: instead it stores incrementals into the "holding disk". Amanda will then flush the held backups to the next blank tape.

Amanda emails me reports after every backup with a neat summary of what went right/wrong. It also gives you several hours advance warning if you forget to load a blank tape or if any of the workstations are offline.

The only downside of Amanda is that it is fiddly to setup. The documentation is poor and the configuration files are cryptic. But if you're willing to invest some time and effort then you can't do much better (for free) than Amanda.

AMANDA uses a FAQ-O-Matic which seems to work very well for their purposes. Cetainly something I've considered implementing myself.

AMANDA uses a FAQ-O-Matic which seems to work very well for their purposes. Cetainly something I've considered implementing myself.

Lately I've been testing amanda as a backup server. It's quite good. You can do backups of your PCs to the server via network.

It stores data in a "holdisk" and it even can be configured tapeless. Or you can configure to always keep as much as possible in the holdisk.

Add RAID, and you can have cheap backups on IDE. It requires the disks always on-line, but then you'll sure the data is still there, because when a drive fails you notice and can replace it without loosing data.

You can always do rm -rf / and screw it all so tape backups are always good to have.

That's exactly what I do. I use Amanda. To do the backups. I have a number of "tapes" setup on the hard drive and they just get reused. Backups are run every night according to the Amanda configuration.

Once a week I do a complete offsite backup onto another disk. It also has a number of "tapes" on it. However, Amanda does a complete backup each time (configured that way).

Several machines are included in this backup.

I had one of those OnStream ADR50 tape drives and spent a bundle on the drive and tapes. I was never happy with it. Eventually, it just stopped.

So I went through the saga of selecting a tape drive again. I only wanted to do something of the quality of DLT. But that was going to cost a small fortune. We pay a lot more for hardware in Australia.

The solution works well and I have performed a test of the recovery.

The I found out about these external USB boxes.

I would advise that you get a USB2.0 card if your machine is USB 1.x. The speed difference is huge.

What's so wrong with amanda?

~Will

As any true administrator knows, anytime you can automate something and eliminate the chance of user error, do it. What you need is a fully automated backup system. There is an open-source one availible, that the last time I used it was extremely reliable, and did it's thing without getting in anyone's way.

It's called Amanda developed by the University of Maryland, and very slowly evolving it works well. The only problem is that setup is a true bitch. It's as bad as sendmail, but don't worry, because after you set it up, you can totally forget about it as it just goes about it's business and sends you emails telling you how swell everything is (or isn't).

Use it, don't let user error destroy your backups.

no policies whatsoever as regards data retention or backup

1) Too bad you don't have a policy. You should have one set.

2) If you're ad-hoc, clarify your position and responsibilities with your manager... If you undertake such responsibility, just construct a policy and apply it.

BTW, amanda is great for site-wide backups.

Without knowing more about the type of data you're storing, I would recommend putting it in a database. I like PostgreSQL 7.x myself.

For the software, I would organize it in a directory structure and use rsync+ssh to mirror it as needed.

For backup software, use Amanda.

For file sharing, use Samba.

'Nuff said.

If there's one thing I hate, it's Faq-o-Matic. I have never been able to get decent information out of such a mega-hyperlinked irritatingly-coloured monstrosity as Faq-o-Matic. That includes OpenLDAP's FAQ-o-Matic, Amanda's FAQ-o-Matic, Lynx's FAQ-o-Matic and FAQ-o-Matic's own FAQ-o-matic. Clicking a hundred links to get to a single paragraph that almost, but not entirely completely fails to answer the question is more annoying than not having an entry at all. And why does every FAQ-o-Matic seem to be hell-bent on experimenting in shades of puke for the colour scheme? Lynx's FOM doesn't follow this trend but damn near every single FOM on the planet is butt-ugly in addition to being terrible to navigate.

Provide FAQs in plain, easy to read HTML or text. Screw FAQ-o-Matic.

When you want to recover something a browser lets you traverse the directory tree and tag the files you want. Then Amanda tells you which tapes to mount to recover them. Cool!

Paul.

FIRE!

Any serious data store needs to include a backup system which allows for copies off-site. Fire is the obvious risk of course, but floods, vandalism and lightning strikes are all possibilities.

AFAIK the only generally available tape backup for something this big is DLT, which IIRC can now do around 40GB per tape before compression. With the 2:1 compression usually quoted thats 80GB per tape, or around 13-14 tapes for a full backup. So you really need about 30 tapes for a double cycle, and maybe more if lots of the data is non-compressible (like movies). But this stuff ain't cheap. DLT drives start at around £1000 and the tapes cost £55 each. So thats around £2500 = $4200 to back this beastie up.

Having said that, the possibility of using hot-swappable IDE drives as backup devices is intriguing. Just point your backup program at /dev/hdx3 or whatever. One big advantage is that if your tape drive gets cooked in the server-room fire you don't have the risk of tapes that can only be read on the drive that wrote them. A Seagate 5400RPM 60GB drive costs £110, which is only a third more per megabyte than a bare DLT tape. Two cycles-worth of backup (34 drives) would be £3,700. And you can probably do better by shopping around. For servers with only a few hundred GB on line this might well be more cost-effective than buying a DLT drive.

We use Amanda to do backups here. Its a useful program, but it can't back up a partition bigger than a tape. So you need to think carefully about your partition strategy. (Side note: you can use tar rather than dump to break up over-large partitions, but its still a pain).

Suddenly that terabyte starts looking a bit more expensive.

Paul.

The most important article:
Realtime data mirroring under Linux

And some other resources...
The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver (AMANDA)
Creating Filesystem Backups with 'rsync'
Linux Backup

amanda Go read, and re-read, how it actually plans and implements backups. You have to watch it run ( $( which watch) amstatus DailySet1 ) a few times to really grok it.

amanda< p>
Go read, and re-read, how it actually plans and implements backups. You have to watch it run ( watch amstatus DailySet1 ) a few times to really grok it.

If your data is fairly static and you just need to mirror it, buy an extra hard drive and run a dump periodically.

If your data changes quite often, and you need the ability to do "point in time" recoveries of particular pieces of data, try Amanda.

Where I work we've just spent 160,000 UK pounds on a backup system like the one described above. Tape library, big Sun box, gigabit cards, the
works.

The major cost was in the software, not the hardware. We looked at the free software option Amanda but it was too linux/unix specific.

We needed support for Win2k, NT, Solaris, Linux, Oracle DBs and more. So we had to get the serious cost software.

And we only specificed a 4 TB backup capacity (though with some room to grow). That's not a particually large lot of data these days.

The suggestion of just mirroring stuff to another disk is a good one, but doesn't really provide enterprise level backup. Unless your mirrored disk is off-site. Then you just move the cost from backups to networking :(

While I really can't stand ARCserveIT, I do like the Overland Unit. The drives and the tapes have proved to be highly reliable and easy to use. ARCserveIT might not be so bad if I was only backing up NT servers.

I would have preferred to stick with AMANDA. While AMANDA can be a bit of a bear to get running, of course this was my first install, it is highly reliable and stable. Support from the developers and users was always timely and helpful. One of the many things to like about AMANDA is that in the event of a catastrophe that native Unix utils (tar, gzip, dump, ufsdump, etc.) can be used to recover the data from the tapes.

AMANDA
the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, is a backup system that allows the administrator of a LAN to set up a single master backup server to back up multiple hosts to a single large capacity tape drive. AMANDA users native dump and/or GNU tar facilities and can back up a large number of workstations running multiple versions of Unix. Recent versions can also use SAMBA to back up Microsoft Windows 95/NT hosts.

I just wish there was a way to implement grandfather-father-child type of multi-level backup on Amanda. Anyone?

You can find the source at www.amanda.org, and Red Hat contrib dir in RPM format.