Amanda, The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver

The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver

Copyright (c) 1991-1998 University of Maryland at College Park, All Rights Reserved.
Portions copyrighted by individual contributers, see the distribution for details.

Permission to use, copy, modify, distribute, and sell this software and its documentation for any purpose is hereby granted without fee, provided that the above copyright notice appear in all copies and that both that copyright notice and this permission notice appear in supporting documentation, and that the name of U.M. not be used in advertising or publicity pertaining to distribution of the software without specific, written prior permission. U.M. makes no representations about the suitability of this software for any purpose. It is provided "as is" without express or implied warranty.
U.M. DISCLAIMS ALL WARRANTIES WITH REGARD TO THIS SOFTWARE, INCLUDING ALL IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS, IN NO EVENT SHALL U.M. BE LIABLE FOR ANY SPECIAL, INDIRECT OR CONSEQUENTIAL DAMAGES OR ANY DAMAGES WHATSOEVER RESULTING FROM LOSS OF USE, DATA OR PROFITS, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, NEGLIGENCE OR OTHER TORTIOUS ACTION, ARISING OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE USE OR PERFORMANCE OF THIS SOFTWARE.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS SOFTWARE IS BEING MADE AVAILABLE ``AS-IS''. UMD and the Amanda contributers are making this work available so that other people can use it. This software is in production use at a number of sites around the world, but we make no warranties that it will work for you. Amanda development is unfunded - the authors maintain the code in their spare time. As a result, there is no support available other than users helping each other on the amanda-users mailing list. See below for information on the mailing lists.

WHAT IS AMANDA

AMANDA, the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, is a backup system that allows the administrator of a LAN to set up a single master backup server to back up multiple hosts to a single large capacity tape drive. AMANDA users native dump and/or GNU tar facilities and can back up a large number of workstations running multiple versions of Unix. Recent versions can also use SAMBA to back up Microsoft Windows 95/NT hosts.

WHERE TO GET THE AMANDA SOFTWARE

The latest UMD Amanda release is always available from: ftp://ftp.amanda.org/pub/amanda The most recent release was version 2.4.0p1, released on June 8, 1998. It fixes a few bugs in release 2.4.0 and several problems present in release 2.3.0.4 (by Blair Zajac), especially security ones, and introduces lots of improvements, but it breaks backward compatibility (which means you can't use older clients with a new server, nor an old server with a new client). It also changes the default database format (from pre-2.4 releases), so you will have to export any existing databases with the previous version of Amanda, and import them back with the new version. If you find problems in this release, before posting messages to the Amanda mailing lists (see beow), look for patches in the Amanda patches page.

The most recent beta release was version 2.4.1b1, released on July 20, 1998. For a list of the main improvements, see the release message.

Development snapshots of Amanda can be downloaded from Alexandre Oliva's home page. They are just snapshots of the Amanda source base taken at random points in time. In general, they're untested, so use them with care.

WHERE TO GET MORE INFORMATION ABOUT AMANDA

Amanda is completely unsupported and made available as-is. Unfortunately, we don't usually have the time to answer all user questions and help all new sites get started. However, we do maintain several mailing lists for those interested in Amanda.

Please note: To subscribe or unsubscribe to a mailing list, DO NOT, EVER, send mail to that list. Send mail to

<listname>-request@amanda.org with the following line in the body of the message: subscribe <your-email-address> and when you want to unsubscribe, use the following line in the body: unsubscribe <your-email-address> where <listname> is one of the following:

amanda-announce

The amanda-announce mailing list is for important announcements related to the Amanda Network Backup Manager package, including new versions, contributions, and fixes.

NOTE: the amanda-users list is itself on the amanda-announce distribution, so you only need to subscribe to one of the two lists, not both.

To subscribe, send a message to amanda-announce-request@amanda.org.

amanda-users

The amanda-users mailing list is for questions and general discussion about the Amanda Network Backup Manager. This package and related files are available via anonymous FTP from ftp.amanda.org in the pub/amanda directory.

NOTE: the amanda-users list is itself on the amanda-announce distribution, so you only need to subscribe to one of the two lists, not both.

To subscribe, send a message to amanda-users-request@amanda.org.

amanda-hackers

The amanda-hackers mailing list is for discussion of the technical details of the Amanda package, including extensions, ports, bugs, fixes, and alpha testing of new versions.

To subscribe, send a message to amanda-hackers-request@amanda.org.

There is a www archive of each of the amanda mailing lists:

SOME AMANDA-RELATED WEB PAGES

The AMANDA Patches Page.
The AMANDA Ongoing Projects Page.
The AMANDA FAQ Page, maintained by Oren Teich.
The AMANDA tapetype list, maintained by Hal Snyder.