Slashdot Mirror
Amanda 2.5 Released
Anonymous Coward writes to tell us that a new release of the popular open source backup tool Amanda is now available fixing many of the limitations of previous versions. From the release: "Overall the focus of the release is on security of the backup process & backed up data, scalability of the backup process and ease of installation & configuration of Amanda."
i've been using amanda at work for the past year now and it's been wonderful. thanks to all the developer's out there who work so hard (the mailing list rocks too).
I've been running it for 4 nights now, replaceing the previous 2.4.5 version I've been running for quite some time, and its working just like the 2.4.5 version it replaced. So if you are worried about the upgrade breaking something, if it worked with your old configs, it should Just Work(TM) with the new version too. I used the same config/build script I've been useing for years to build and install it.
Newbies, please goto amanda.org or zmanda.org and read the top ten FAQ there, it will save you many headaches in getting it setup. To make it work, and work well, may require a re-thinking of how you think a backup should be done. Once setup its a background process you get nightly emails from, but requires little or no hand-holding on a daily basis other than making sure the tape needed is in the drive for tonights run. vtape users (where the tape images are kept on a humongous hard drive) don't even have to deal with that, the best of both worlds IMO. I've been doing that for about 18 months or more here at the coyote.den, my private domains name.
And I highly recommend subscribing to the amanda-user mailing list, details on amanda.org, where you can ask for help and get it from more knowledgable people than I, although you will find me there too. 10 messages is a busy day so it won't eat your lunch.
--
Cheers, Gene
Nothing against Amanda, but I switched from using Amanda to going to BackupPC. http://backuppc.sf.net/
/bin/ls on five of your linux boxes that all run the same distribution. It will only store one copy of /bin/ls on the backup server and use hardlinks to keep track of all the other copies. Plus it compresses the files.
What I really like about BackupPC is the Disk based backup focus of it. It does NOT support tape drives. But for doing backups to hard drives it is great. And with the way it will only keep one copy of a file, no matter how many systems it is on really helps to minimize disk space usage. Example: You have
Great stuff!
Yes, it supports tape spanning. It also supports compression and encryption of your choice (so you should be able to use star instead of gtar & bzip2 rather than gzip). These are the most frequently requested features, so this is really a good release!
A good piece of software thats getting some attention it deserves. Looking at http://amanda.zmanda.com/amanda-25-released.html and the wiki at http://wiki.amanda.com/ it feel like amanda is getting the recognition it deserves. For newbies I would recommed http://forums.zmanda.com/ and the wiki above.
yeah it is, just not off their site:r veri ent
http://packages.debian.org/stable/utils/amanda-se
http://packages.debian.org/stable/utils/amanda-cl
Also we use rsnapshot for hourly/daily/weekly/monthly snapshots of the whole filesystem (rsnapshot is very cool and simple too).
Nope. This is the *real* Amanda release. I checked on Sourceforge as well. Zmanda seems to be a company behind Amanda project. You can see the rainbow'ed Amanda logo on their wiki (http://wiki.zmanda.com/)
Two key features distingush Amanda from Bacula
- Data format on the media: You can restore from Amanda media without using Amanda. The commands to
restore data is part of the header
- Consistent backup window: Amanda unique scheduler tries to backup same amount of data every backup run.
Paddy
Take a look at the Application API (http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Application_API) proposal.
Amanda 2.4.4 is in debian stable. 2.4.5p1 is under test. 2.5.0 will be available from the debian maintainer soon.
It will be also available from http://www.zmanda.com/downloads.html site soon
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.
From TFA:
Amanda is the world's most popular open source backup and recovery software. Amanda allows system administrators to set up a single server to back up multiple hosts to a tape- or disk-based storage system over the network.
Or am I missing something?
Get WinRAR and write a script to RAR the Application Data\Outlook directory (or wherever his mail files are stored) utilising recovery or whatever RAR calls it these days. You could extract the system date & time to generate a timestamp for the filename (bob-20060327104754BST.rar) Then add in his work files e.g. *.doc *.xls *.ppt etc. Then get puTTY tools (notably pscp) and then (script) use that to scp the file up to your backup server. You could also use the windows port of gpg to sign & encrypt the backup file first using a "Company X Backup" key-pair to keep the files secure whilst on the backup server. You can set a scheduled task on his XP box to run all of this every x times per day. Simple and low cost.
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?