Книга: Fedora™ Unleashed, 2008 edition

Using the Amanda Backup Application

Using the Amanda Backup Application

Provided with Fedora, Amanda is a powerful network backup application created by the University of Maryland at College Park. Amanda is a robust backup and restore application best suited to unattended backups with an autoloading tape drive of adequate capacity. It benefits from good user support and documentation.

Amanda's features include compression and encryption. It is intended for use with high-capacity tape drives, optical, CD-R, and CD-RW devices.

Amanda uses GNU tar and dump; it is intended for unattended, automated tape backups, and is not well suited for interactive or ad hoc backups. The support for tape devices in Amanda is robust, and file restoration is relatively simple. Although Amanda does not support older Macintosh clients, it uses Samba to back up Microsoft Windows clients, as well as any Unix client that can use GNU tools (which includes Mac OS X). Because Amanda runs on top of standard GNU tools, you can restore files using those tools on a recovery disk even if the Amanda server is not available. File compression can be done on either the client or server, thus lightening the computational load on less powerful machines that need backing up.

There is no GUI interface for Amanda. Configuration is done in the time-honored Unix tradition of editing text configuration files located in /etc/amanda. The default installation in Fedora includes a sample cron file because it is expected that you will be using cron to run Amanda regularly. The client utilities are installed with the package am-utils; the Amanda server must be obtained from the Amanda website. As far as backup schemes are concerned, Amanda calculates an optimal scheme on the fly and schedules it accordingly. It can be forced to adhere to a traditional scheme, but other tools are possibly better suited for that job.

The man page for Amanda (the client is amdump) is well written and useful, explaining the configuration of Amanda as well as detailing the programs that actually make up Amanda. The configuration files found in /etc/amanda are well commented; they provide a number of examples to assist you in configuration.

The program's home page is http://www.amanda.org/. There, you will find information on subscribing to the mail list, as well as links to Amanda-related projects and a FAQ.

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