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Amanda 2.5 Released

Posted by ScuttleMonkey on Sun Mar 26, 2006 06:11 PM
from the better-ways-to-stash-your-goods dept.
Software Data Storage Linux
Anonymous Coward writes to tell us that a new release of the popular open source backup tool Amanda is now available fixing many of the limitations of previous versions. From the release: "Overall the focus of the release is on security of the backup process & backed up data, scalability of the backup process and ease of installation & configuration of Amanda."
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[+] Ask Slashdot: What is Your Backup Policy? 124 comments
higuita asks: "A few days ago, I was asked to check our backups policy, how they are being applied and to try to make it safer and more useful. Being new to the company, I started to check what is being done right now and found several problems. Since I don't have much experience with enterprise backups, what are the most used backup policies, software and global ideas about this issue? We have less than 1000 workstations (Windows and Macs), about 20 Oracle and Exchange servers (split between Windows, Solaris, and Linux), and it all needs to be backed up. Right now, we use the HP data protector with several tapes, where most things have a weekly full backup and daily incremental backups, and that most full backups are archived permanently in a safe we have for this purpose. We also have off-site storage for backups, as well. What practices and policies do Slashdot users implement for backups they perform at their office (home backups practices I am not interested in)?"
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  • What a co-incidence! (Score:5, Funny)

    by QuantumG (50515) <qg@biodome.org> on Sunday March 26 2006, @06:23PM (#14999726) Homepage Journal
    In high school, Amanda was always my backup too!

    Ahh, fun times.

    • Re:What a co-incidence! (Score:4, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward on Sunday March 26 2006, @06:35PM (#14999757)
      It is not nice to call your sister your backup.

    • Re:What a co-incidence! (Score:3, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      In high school, Amanda was always my backup too!

      Was Amanda's last name Hugankiss?
    • Couldn't help but notice that the body of the post was
      >Amanda was always my backup
      and the signature was
      >Your wife just won't understand

    • Not just high-school backup... (Score:5, Funny)

      by Dystopian Rebel (714995) on Sunday March 26 2006, @11:51PM (#15000657) Journal
      ~~~ A SLASHDOT VIGNETTE ~~~

      [telephone rings]

      Slashdotter: Hello? Oh hi Mom. How's my laundry coming along?

      Mother: It's almost done, dearie. I can't seem to get the stain out of your Starfleet Command t-shirt, though.

      Slashdotter: [frustrated] Aww!

      Mother: Don't worry, I'll keep trying. [pause] Dear, are you seeing anyone? I'm worried about you.

      Slashdotter: Aw come on, mom. Well, um, yeah... sure I'm seeing someone.

      Mother: You're not fibbing again, are you?

      Slashdotter: What? No!

      Mother: If you aren't fibbing, tell me what her name is.

      Slashdotter: Uh...her name is... Amanda.

      Mother: Really?

      Slashdotter: Yeah, Amanda. I'm serious. Amanda is really cool.

      Mother: You have a GIRLFRIEND? REALLY? I'm so thrilled! Your father will be so thrilled!

      Slashdotter: Yes... Amanda. In fact, she's someone at the office. We really "click".

      Mother: Oh! I am ~so~ glad. You do have to be careful with an office relationship, dearie. I hope you are being discrete.

      Slashdotter: Don't worry, mom. We keep it very professional when we see each other at work.

      Mother: I'm glad! Amanda... that is a nice name. Is she pretty?

      Slashdotter: Oh yes, yes she is. Pretty in an intuitive sort of way. And totally low maintenance.

      Mother: She sounds wonderful!

      Slashdotter: Yeah... um... Yeah, and mom? Amanda would really like to see my Starfleet Command t-shirt this weekend...

      Mother: I'll take care of it right away, dear! Your father will be so thrilled!

           
  • i've been using amanda at work for the past year now and it's been wonderful. thanks to all the developer's out there who work so hard (the mailing list rocks too).
  • Well, it should've been, anyhow.
  • I love and trust Amanda to do all my backup. Thanks for the new release...

  • Works great with older setups & configs (Score:5, Informative)

    by Almost-Retired (637760) on Sunday March 26 2006, @06:36PM (#14999763)
    I've been running it for 4 nights now, replaceing the previous 2.4.5 version I've been running for quite some time, and its working just like the 2.4.5 version it replaced. So if you are worried about the upgrade breaking something, if it worked with your old configs, it should Just Work(TM) with the new version too. I used the same config/build script I've been useing for years to build and install it.

    Newbies, please goto amanda.org or zmanda.org and read the top ten FAQ there, it will save you many headaches in getting it setup. To make it work, and work well, may require a re-thinking of how you think a backup should be done. Once setup its a background process you get nightly emails from, but requires little or no hand-holding on a daily basis other than making sure the tape needed is in the drive for tonights run. vtape users (where the tape images are kept on a humongous hard drive) don't even have to deal with that, the best of both worlds IMO. I've been doing that for about 18 months or more here at the coyote.den, my private domains name.

    And I highly recommend subscribing to the amanda-user mailing list, details on amanda.org, where you can ask for help and get it from more knowledgable people than I, although you will find me there too. 10 messages is a busy day so it won't eat your lunch.

    --
    Cheers, Gene
    • I've been using it for close to 10 years and it needs very little care-and-feeding. The spanning will be nice. Glad to hear your having success with it.
      • In fact I have about a 7 year history with amanda. Having worn out 4 of those 4 tape seagate changers & a couple of regular DDS2 drives, I've come to the conclusion that disks, having much more development money behind them, have indeed now exceeded the utility of tapes when I can buy a disk that lasts several years, possibly a decade, for 10% or less the cost per gigabyte of an equivalent tape drive and its backup medium. But thats just my opinion, the opinion of an old man these days as I'm now 71.
  • Does it support spanning archives across tapes yet? I used amanda a lot about 4 years ago and was amazed that it didn't support such a simple function.

    • Yes! Tape Spanning! (Score:5, Informative)

      by Noksagt (69097) on Sunday March 26 2006, @06:42PM (#14999786) Homepage
      Yes, it supports tape spanning. It also supports compression and encryption of your choice (so you should be able to use star instead of gtar & bzip2 rather than gzip). These are the most frequently requested features, so this is really a good release!
      • I would much rather back up to DVD than tapes, and while various backup programs support this I have yet to find one that will cope if I want to back up more than 4.4GB.

        I don't want anything fancy - just full and incremental backup. Yet every product seems to be designed either for single users backing up key documents to a single CD, or for enterprise users backing up terabytes of documents to expensive tape drives!
        • I know that Mondo Rescue supports spanning over discs of any size. It also supports differential backups. I personally use it for nightly backups. Setup is simple via command line switches, and restoring is done via a curses-based tool on the bootable iso. http://mondorescue.org/about.shtml [mondorescue.org]
            • Some enterprises might be stingy with quota per person, but when you multiply that by the number of people in the company (including the big wigs who rarely have a practical quota), it is quite large. In addition to smaller capacity, optical media scratch and have a shorter shelf life than tape. Yes, there are archival quality discs. No, they're not extremely cheap (which would be the only reason to use DVDs). Also, most CD carousels/robots carry a stiff enough price premium such that you might as well

  • BackupPC is also good (Score:5, Informative)

    by HappyCamp (707842) on Sunday March 26 2006, @06:40PM (#14999776)
    Nothing against Amanda, but I switched from using Amanda to going to BackupPC. http://backuppc.sf.net/ [sf.net]

    What I really like about BackupPC is the Disk based backup focus of it. It does NOT support tape drives. But for doing backups to hard drives it is great. And with the way it will only keep one copy of a file, no matter how many systems it is on really helps to minimize disk space usage. Example: You have /bin/ls on five of your linux boxes that all run the same distribution. It will only store one copy of /bin/ls on the backup server and use hardlinks to keep track of all the other copies. Plus it compresses the files.

    Great stuff!
  • The biggest thing I have problems with using Amanda is the need for a clean IP path to the destination, so I can't run a backup through a proxy firewall. Does the new version still use UDP for control?

  • How does it compare to Bacula? (Score:4, Interesting)

    by leereyno (32197) on Sunday March 26 2006, @06:50PM (#14999813) Homepage Journal
    How does this new version compare to Bacula (http://www.bacula.org/ [bacula.org])?

    The thing I like about Bacula is that it will allow you to spread a backup job accross multiple tapes, supports backups to disk, has its own scheduling system, and has a native windows client. From what I understand Amanda uses tar and relies upon NFS, SMB, or other network filesystem protocols to work. Bacula on the other hand has a true client/server architecture with a native client running on all of the systems it supports. It also makes use of MySQL to keep track of backup jobs. This made it very easy for me to create a web interface for it (http://raobackup.eas.asu.edu/ [asu.edu]

    If Amanda has been improved to be competitive with Bacula in some of these areas then I'll definitely have to investigate it.

    Lee

    • Re:How does it compare to Bacula? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Noksagt (69097) on Sunday March 26 2006, @06:55PM (#14999833) Homepage
      This version of amanda supports tape spanning. Many used to say use amanda for the scheduler or bacula for the tape spanning. Since amanda spans, this no longer holds.

      Amanda has always allowed backups to a holding disk & the scheduler has been fantasitc. There isn't a native windows client, but the windows client runs fine under cygwin, or one can backup SMB shares.

      Amanda does rely on tar (which is, IMHO, a good thing), but that tar can be different on each client (so that one can backup resource forks on OS X, for example).

      Amanda doesn't rely on NFS or SMB, but can use them. There are excellent web interfaces through, for example, webmin.
      • Two key features distingush Amanda from Bacula

        - Data format on the media: You can restore from Amanda media without using Amanda. The commands to
        restore data is part of the header

        - Consistent backup window: Amanda unique scheduler tries to backup same amount of data every backup run.

        Paddy
    • For me, the lack of automatic backup scheduling in other packages is a complete deal-breaker. Amanda, I just tell it how many full backups I want over what period, and it makes it happen. There's no "full backup this friday" crap. You don't have enough tape? It defers the backups it can, and lets you know you need to get more... it's painless.

      For a site with growing storage there's no alternative to Amanda.
    • Odd that you got modded 'troll,' since I think your question is anything but.

      I've been wondering the same thing. There are quite a few Linux backup products out there, ranging from the more full-featured network backup systems like Amanda and Bacula to shell scripts (some of which are damned impressive by themselves). I've become aware of all the different options because I just bought a DDS tape autoloader for backing up my home network, and choosing one can be pretty daunting. (And I only have a handful o
        • I've been using Bacula for almost 3 years now on 2 different servers with no problems. I'm sure that Amanda is very stable, but it is not alone in this respect.

          Lee

  • I Tried It Once... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Illbay (700081) on Sunday March 26 2006, @06:51PM (#14999821) Journal
    ...but had a tough time with the (at least at that time) limited hardware support. While I'm sure they've probably worked that out (at least to a better degree than before), my search for alternatives back then turned up rdiff-backup [rdiff-backup.org].

    Not only has it always been versatile as far as the hardware it uses--for my SOHO server, an external USB Harddrive is the ticket, one that I can just snatch and carry with me if natural disaster threatens, e.g.--but the METHOD of backup [nongnu.org] is superior to anything I've personally ever encountered.

    Backup AND restore are both a breeze.

    I'm sure that AMANDA is more appropriate for many (read "more servers") usage, but I've found rdiff-backup to be perfect for someone like me, with only a single server to worry about (althought that single server contains all my family's business and personal files--so to us, it's not such a trivial thing).

    • What problems with hardware support did you have? It can write to any tape device that mt can & integrate with any tape changer that mtx can. It can read and write to any disk that the kernel allows. rdiff-backup was started fairly recently, so I can't imagine your amanda problems were insurmountable.

  • solid piece of software (Score:3, Informative)

    by 2old2rock (963747) on Sunday March 26 2006, @06:52PM (#14999826)
    A good piece of software thats getting some attention it deserves. Looking at http://amanda.zmanda.com/amanda-25-released.html [zmanda.com] and the wiki at http://wiki.amanda.com/ [amanda.com] it feel like amanda is getting the recognition it deserves. For newbies I would recommed http://forums.zmanda.com/ [zmanda.com] and the wiki above.
  • Does it support generalised backup apps, or do they still have to be wrapped in scripts to make them look like dump or tar?
  • How does Amanda compare to proprietary solutions (e.g. NetVault)?

    And does it support tape backup hardware?
  • Can Amanda handle POSIX access control lists?

    Melissa

  • Nice but.. (Score:3, Informative)

    by daniel_newton (817437) on Sunday March 26 2006, @07:46PM (#14999961)
    I these backup programs seem to complicated for me. At work we just use tar for our archival backup (I can have a bare metal restore from tape of our main production server up in about 2 hours).

    Also we use rsnapshot [freshmeat.net] for hourly/daily/weekly/monthly snapshots of the whole filesystem (rsnapshot is very cool and simple too).

    • Re:Nice but.. (Score:3, Informative)

      by dj44 (955353)
      If you have more than 2 or 3 machines that you want to backup to disk and especially tape you need Amanda for automation. After initial setup Amanda doesn't require any babysitting, it just works for you. ---- dj

  • What's next for amanda? (Score:5, Informative)

    by Noksagt (69097) on Sunday March 26 2006, @08:36PM (#15000099) Homepage
    From the amanda hacker's list:
    We need to decide on the release version? 2.6? 2.5.1?

    Following is the list of features that have been requested:

    - Support for POSIX file names (allowing spaces in filenames)
    - Amanda user ids consistency (sourceforge bug 1416737) - Requested by
    Paul Bijnens, Mitch Collinsworth
    - Backing up filesystem ACLs (schily tar support)
    - Design and implementation of application API (new Dumper API)
        (Proposal in http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Application_API [zmanda.com] )
    - Cleaning up the device interface to support WORM devices
        (Suggested by mhelmling http://forums.zmanda.com/showthread.php?t=28 [zmanda.com] )

    Of course, all open bugs in sourceforge.net bug tracker have to be addressed.

    If you have feature requests or if you find bugs, please post them in
    sourceforge.net bug tracker
    (http://sourceforge.net/tracker/?group_id=120&atid =100120 [sourceforge.net])

    Thanks,
    Paddy
      • It can and does backup names with spaces. I have it backup windows clients and *nix SMB servers which have a lot of long filenames.

        I believe what is meant here is that certain configuration files (such as the list of which disks to backup or files to exclude) are delimited with white space.

        This is currently somewhat anoying, but not too limiting. You'll tell it to backup things like "/home" and "/etc" or "/cygdrive/c/Docume~1" & it will backup files and folders in those with names like "New Folder" a

    • Re:Amanda or Zmanda? (Score:2, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Nope. This is the *real* Amanda release. I checked on Sourceforge as well. Zmanda seems to be a company behind Amanda project. You can see the rainbow'ed Amanda logo on their wiki (http://wiki.zmanda.com/ [zmanda.com])

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