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Network backups with Amanda

Auntie Amanda

Article from ADMIN 36/2016

By Tim Schürmann

The free Amanda backup utility dates back to the days of tape drives, but it is still a powerful tool for centralized backup across the network.

The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, also known as Amanda, backs up a computer across the network to a central backup server. The backups migrate to hard drives, network storage, optical media, or legacy tapes.

Amanda [1] was launched in 1991 by the University of Maryland's Department of Computer Science. Zmanda has handled development since 2007 and still hosts the Amanda forum today. Zmanda is now part of the Carbonite corporation, which has supported Amanda development since 2013. Amanda is available under the BSD license and the GPL, which means you can use it for free – even in a commercial environment. Support is available through Zmanda, along with the enhanced Amanda Enterprise edition, which offers a graphical user interface and other value-added perks. The Enterprise edition starts at $500 for the server and $300 for each client.

Backup via SSH

Amanda backs up all the systems over the network in parallel. Admins typically launch Amanda via a cron job. The data transfer uses encryption via OpenSSH on request. This support for encryption through OpenSSH means you can even back up systems in the DMZ without having to worry about eavesdropping. Current Amanda versions also support IPv6 connections and authentication via Kerberos 5.

Amanda copes with a large number of clients and can easily adapt to changing conditions. Before the backup, Amanda can launch a test program that performs a sanity check on all participating computers in parallel. If the test finds an error, it notifies the administrator by email. On request, Amanda encrypts all data on the client or the server via GPG or another encryption program. Amanda can even compress the archives with gzip or any other compression program – either directly on the client or on the server. The backup tool relies on standard Linux tools for

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