Linux Belgium

AMANDA Network Backup System

Amanda is OpenSource network backup software. It's completely free and has impressive capabilities. It can be an interesting and cheap alternative for commercial network backup software. As with all network backup software it has it's advantages and disadvantages. We sum them up for your convenience:

Advantages:

Free of licensing costs (you can buy a nice tape robot AND the installation service for the price of commercial network backup software)

Immediately available for download

Can be used to backup and restore Windows, Linux and UNIX clients

Can be configured for backup to disk and or tape

Supports virtually any tape drive and tape robot

Uses the available tapes in an intelligent fashion

Can also be used to perform backups to disk

Uses a powerful command-line or web interface

Disadvantages:

Windows backup is based on ntbackup or other backup-to-disk software

The Amanda website looks unprofessional

The backup scheme has to be 'the Amanda way'

Difficult to setup initially

Does not support online database backups

Has problems with filesystems or databases larger than the tapesize

Suggestions
Also have a look at Bacula, the way of working matches more with the backup philosophy of a typical enterprise network backup tool. We can assist you in setting up Amanda for you and automating everything:
In a 2-3 day period we configure Amanda to make use of your Tape drive and/or Tape robot, install and configure Amanda on your clients (Windows, Unix, Linux), perform a test backup and restore and explain the web interface on your Linux distribution of choice. Contact us for a price quote.

In our System Administration Course we also handle Amanda and Bacula.

To other great OpenSource software

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