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Due to the technological revolution we are currently experiencing, we wanted to make a brief review of one of the most famous and well-known network archivers today, this archiver is known as Amanda, and this time we want to talk in detail what we consider most important about this software created to help the IT administrator to configure a single backup server.

It is undoubtedly an interesting tool which deserves its own mention in this blog, so we will try to show its most important features and give an objective opinion about this tool.

To start breaking down this tool, let's first define what Amanda is, and then we will be able to describe more easily some of the contributions it presents to the whole community.

What is Amanda?

Amanda, an advanced automatic network disk archiver from Maryland, is a backup solution that allows the IT administrator to configure a single primary backup server to back up multiple hosts over the network to tape drives/changers, disks or optical media. Amanda uses native utilities and formats plus it can back up a large number of servers and workstations running multiple versions of Linux or unix, plus use a native Windows client to back up Microsoft Windows servers and desktops. We have taken the definition from Amanda's own website, to help us put together this review.

History of Amanda

Although it was originally developed for the computer science department of the University of Maryland, today it is distributed for free as open source under a BSD license, which is managed and supervised by a group of volunteers who have assumed the control and total operation of the archiver. This disk archiver created by James da Silva in 1992, has remained in time, allowing it to occupy an important position in the different operating systems we have today, within which include systems such as Windows, Linux, unix, Android and others, and although Amanda is a free also has paid editions such as Amanda Enterprise. Amanda was registered at SourceForge.net in 1999, since then Jean-Louis Martineau from the University of Montreal, has been in charge of the growth of Amanda for the last years. In all this time more than 250 developers have contributed their knowledge, which has been supported by thousands of users who have provided testing and feedback, resulting in a solid and stable package for the general public.

Amanda's growth

In 2006 it was envisioned that Amanda would be deployed on over 20,000 sites worldwide, by now it is very likely that those numbers have been reached. In its early days, Amanda was primarily used by universities, technical labs and research departments, however today with the widespread adoption of Linux in IT in general, this archiver has come to be found in many places, especially in applications deployed on a LAMP stack. Since its inception, to date Amanda has received several awards for the excellent features of this archiver, showing the steady growth it has been having over the years, for example in 2005 it received the Linux Journal readers' Choice Award for "favorite backup system".

Latest version of Amanda

The latest stable version of Amanda is 3.5.2, released on July 20, 2022, which is provided to the market with the purpose of addressing all types of unintentional deletions of tape data in the backup environment. By allowing the user to secure their data on tape and not replace it with a new backup set, this can be a real advantage to the user by avoiding time consuming new backups regardless of the value set in the retention period.

User input

- Amanda uses a fairly flexible optimization strategy, as it balances the amount of tape or disk space that can be used for a given level with the amount of tapes that will be needed to recover a system. In addition to all this, Amanda also takes care of balancing the use of resources such as (network bandwidth, tape space and backup time) through the dump cycle, which is usually performed within 5 to 10 days, to smooth out the demands and avoid excessive peaks. - One of the main advantages offered by Amanda is that the user will get at least 1 full backup of each disk list entry (DLE) through each dump cycle. - Of course, there are a number of parameters available to adjust the demand strategy to specific environments, so we suggest you do a little more research on this aspect. - Allows us to automate the backup of popular databases. - Allows us to perform a recovery from scratch of any popular open system platform, such as a PC or laptop computer. - Allows us to use valuable open source backup products. - Allows us to understand the status of commercial backup software, including explanations of CDP and data replication software - Allows us to access the current state of backup hardware, including virtual tape libraries (VTLs).

Most relevant features about Amanda

- Amanda has the particularity that it can take 1 or 2 dump cycles to distribute full backups, basically it uses the first cycle to create an idea of what it is dealing with and store the information at the beginning, and the second dump uses it to find the fulls distributed along the dump cycle and the smoothed load. - Amanda is extensible to support new archiving applications. - It can handle a large number of clients and data and is very easy to install and maintain, in fact working with two different clients can be a breeze, even with clients on different operating systems such as Linux and Windows, in total it can perform a backup in less than 15 minutes. - Amanda scales up and down well, so small configurations are possible, even if it is for a single client. - It is written in C (with some Perl and Shell scripting), and is portable code for any version of Linux and UNIX, among which we can also include Mac OS-X.

Conclusion

Undoubtedly this tool has earned an exclusive mention in this blog thanks to all the benefits it brings to the community, of course there are many other options that can offer a range of options quite similar to those offered by Amanda, however the sustained growth that Amanda has been having since its inception to the present date is truly something worth mentioning and that is why we wanted to dedicate this brief review to know the main elements it offers. Therefore, we can only say that within the variety of tools offered by the market, Amanda is among the most efficient for this function among many others.

Latest version of Amanda