In the quest for world domination it's important not to forget your backups. And, in the world of backup software, Amanda rocks. Amanda runs from the inetd daemon and can backup multiple clients to a single backup server. It streams backup . . .
In the quest for world domination it's important not to forget your backups. And, in the world of backup software, Amanda rocks. Amanda runs from the inetd daemon and can backup multiple clients to a single backup server. It streams backup data from all of its clients to a holding disk (or directory) before writing the data to tape. This has the dual benefit of not only creating a backup if you forget to change the tape but also accelerating the entire backup process itself. With a Quantum DLT 8000 tape drive, I commonly backed up about 12GB/hour from 13 servers (and this was with no tuning whatsoever. My restores were fast as hell as well.)

Amanda uses native utilities to backup the clients thus allowing you to customize whether you want to use dump or tar on a per-client basis, the amount of compression to use, and the amount of bandwidth on your network you are willing to allocate to the backup process. By using native backup utilities, amanda allows you get the benefit of not only having a backup utility which is always available on your platform but also the benefit of being able to restore your data even if Amanda is completely unavailable. One of the nice things about Amanda is that it will never screw you out of your data by using closed and proprietary formats or forcing you to dig up a licensing diskette while under stress.

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