Amanda

AMANDA, aka Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, is basically an Open Source archiving tool or data backup system which allows the administrators to set up a single master backup server to backup data from multiple hosts over the network to backup mediums using a client-server model which includes atleast:

• the backup server & client itself
• a tape server
• an index server

All these servers may not necessarily reside on the same machine. With Amanda, one can backup data residing on multiple computers on a network. AMANDA uses native dump and/or GNU tar facilities & can back up a large number of workstations running multiple versions of Unix. Amanda uses Samba, Cygwin or a native Windows client to back up Microsoft Windows desktops and servers as well.

AMANDA started as a university project for the University of Maryland which was later released under a BSD style of a license and is now available both as an open source community edition & a fully supported enterprise edition. It runs almost on any Unix or Linux based systems and may also be combined with a native Win32 client that comes with support for open files.

Amanda supports both tape & disk-based backups and provides some useful functionality not available in other backup products like tape-spanning, ie, if a backup set does not fit in one tape, it will be split into multiple tapes. Among its key features is an intelligent scheduler which optimizes use of computing resources across backup runs.