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Amanda 2.5 Released

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the better-ways-to-stash-your-goods dept.

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."

7 of 155 comments (clear)

  1. Works great with older setups & configs by Almost-Retired · · Score: 4, Informative

    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

  2. BackupPC is also good by HappyCamp · · Score: 5, Informative

    Nothing against Amanda, but I switched from using Amanda to going to BackupPC. http://backuppc.sf.net/

    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 /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.

    Great stuff!

  3. Yes! Tape Spanning! by Noksagt · · Score: 4, Informative

    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!

  4. solid piece of software by 2old2rock · · Score: 3, Informative

    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.

  5. Nice but.. by daniel_newton · · Score: 3, Informative
    I these backup programs seem to complicated for me. At work we just use tar for our archival backup (I can have a bare metal restore from tape of our main production server up in about 2 hours).

    Also we use rsnapshot for hourly/daily/weekly/monthly snapshots of the whole filesystem (rsnapshot is very cool and simple too).

    1. Re:Nice but.. by dj44 · · Score: 3, Informative

      If you have more than 2 or 3 machines that you want to backup to disk and especially tape you need Amanda for automation. After initial setup Amanda doesn't require any babysitting, it just works for you. ---- dj

  6. What's next for amanda? by Noksagt · · Score: 4, Informative
    From the amanda hacker's list:
    We need to decide on the release version? 2.6? 2.5.1?

    Following is the list of features that have been requested:

    - Support for POSIX file names (allowing spaces in filenames)
    - Amanda user ids consistency (sourceforge bug 1416737) - Requested by
    Paul Bijnens, Mitch Collinsworth
    - Backing up filesystem ACLs (schily tar support)
    - Design and implementation of application API (new Dumper API)
        (Proposal in http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Application_API )
    - Cleaning up the device interface to support WORM devices
        (Suggested by mhelmling http://forums.zmanda.com/showthread.php?t=28 )

    Of course, all open bugs in sourceforge.net bug tracker have to be addressed.

    If you have feature requests or if you find bugs, please post them in
    sourceforge.net bug tracker
    (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=120&atid =100120)

    Thanks,
    Paddy