pkgsrc/sysutils/amanda-server/DESCR

Amanda, The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver
Copyright (c) 1991-1998 University of Maryland at College Park
All Rights Reserved.

See the files COPYRIGHT, COPYRIGHT-REGEX and COPYRIGHT-APACHE for
distribution conditions and official warranty disclaimer.

PLEASE NOTE: THIS SOFTWARE IS BEING MADE AVAILABLE ``AS-IS''. UMD is making
this work available so that other people can use it.  This software is in
production use at our home site - the UMCP Department of Computer Science -
but we make no warranties that it will work for you.  Amanda development is
unfunded - the development team maintains the code in their spare time.  As a
result, there is no support available other than users helping each other on
the Amanda mailing lists.  See below for information on the mailing lists.


WHAT IS AMANDA?
---------------

This is a release of Amanda, the Advanced Maryland Automatic
Network Disk Archiver.  Amanda is a backup system designed to archive many
computers on a network to a single large-capacity tape drive.  

Here are some features of Amanda:

  * written in C, freely distributable.
  * built on top of standard backup software: Unix dump/restore, GNU Tar
    and others.
  * will back up multiple machines in parallel to a holding disk, blasting
    finished dumps one by one to tape as fast as we can write files to
    tape.  For example, a ~2 Gb 8mm tape on a ~240K/s interface to a host
    with a large holding disk can be filled by Amanda in under 4 hours. 
  * does simple tape management: will not overwrite the wrong tape.
  * supports tape changers via a generic interface.  Easily customizable to
    any type of tape carousel, robot, or stacker that can be controlled via
    the unix command line.
  * supports Kerberos 4 security, including encrypted dumps.  The Kerberos
    support is available as a separate add-on package, see the file
    KERBEROS.HOW-TO-GET on the ftp site, and the file docs/KERBEROS in this
    package, for more details.
  * for a restore, tells you what tapes you need, and finds the proper
    backup image on the tape for you.
  * recovers gracefully from errors, including down or hung machines.
  * reports results, including all errors in detail, in email.
  * will dynamically adjust backup schedule to keep within constraints: no
    more juggling by hand when adding disks and computers to network.
  * includes a pre-run checker program, that conducts sanity checks on both
    the tape server host and all the client hosts (in parallel), and will
    send an e-mail report of any problems that could cause the backups to
    fail.
  * can compress dumps before sending or after sending over the net, with
    either compress or gzip.
  * can optionally synchronize with external backups, for those large
    timesharing computers where you want to do full dumps when the system
    is down in single-user mode (since BSD dump is not reliable on active
    filesystems): Amanda will still do your daily dumps.
  * lots of other options; Amanda is very configurable.


WHAT ARE THE SYSTEM REQUIREMENTS FOR AMANDA?
--------------------------------------------

Amanda requires a host that is mostly idle during the time backups are
done, with a large capacity tape drive (e.g. an EXABYTE, DAT or DLT tape).
This becomes the "tape server host".  All the computers you are going to dump
are the "backup client hosts".  The server host can also be a client host.

Amanda works best with one or more large "holding disk" partitions on the
server host available to it for buffering dumps before writing to tape.
The holding disk allows Amanda to run backups in parallel to the disk, only
writing them to tape when the backup is finished.  Note that the holding
disk is not required: without it Amanda will run backups sequentially to
the tape drive.  Running it this way kills the great performance, but still
allows you to take advantage of Amanda's other features.

As a rule of thumb, for best performance the holding disk should be larger
than the dump output from your largest disk partitions.  For example, if
you are backing up some full gigabyte disks that compress down to 500 MB,
then you'll want 500 MB on your holding disk.  On the other hand, if those
gigabyte drives are partitioned into 500 MB filesystems, they'll probably
compress down to 250 MB and you'll only need that much on your holding
disk.  Amanda will perform better with larger holding disks.

Actually, Amanda will still work if you have full dumps that are larger
than the holding disk: Amanda will send those dumps directly to tape one at
a time.  If you have many such dumps you will be limited by the dump speed
of those machines.

Amanda does not yet support single backup images larger than a tape.


WHAT SYSTEMS DOES AMANDA RUN ON?
--------------------------------

Amanda should run on any modern Unix system that supports dump or GNU
tar, has sockets and inetd, and either system V shared memory, or BSD
mmap implemented.

In particular, Amanda 2.4.1p1 has been compiled, and the client side tested
on the following systems:
	AIX 3.2 and 4.1
	BSDI BSD/OS 2.1 and 3.1
	DEC OSF/1 3.2 and 4.0
	FreeBSD 2.2.5
	IRIX 5.2 and 6.3
	GNU/Linux on x86, alpha, sparc, arm and powerpc
	NetBSD 1.0
	Nextstep 3 (*)
	OpenBSD 2.5 x86, sparc, etc (ports available)
	SunOS 4.1.x (x >= 1) and 5.[567]
	Ultrix 4.2
	HP-UX 9.x and 10.x (x >= 01)

The Amanda 2.4.1p1 server side is known to run on all of the other
machines except on those marked with an asterisk.

If you know of any system that is not listed here on which amanda
builds successfully, either client&server or client-only, please
report to amanda-hackers@amanda.org.


WHERE DO I GET AMANDA?
----------------------

There are several versions of Amanda.  The latest version at the time
of this writing is available at:

	ftp://ftp.amanda.org/pub/amanda


HOW DO I GET AMANDA UP AND RUNNING?
-----------------------------------

Read the file docs/INSTALL.  There are a variety of steps, from compiling
Amanda to installing it on the tape server host and the client machines.
    docs/INSTALL	contains general installation instructions.
    docs/SYSTEM.NOTES	contains system-specific information.
    docs/FAQ            contains answers to frequently asked questions.
    docs/KERBEROS	explains installation under Kerberos 4.
    docs/TAPE.CHANGERS	explains how to customize the changer interface.
    docs/WHATS.NEW	details new features.


WHO DO I TALK TO IF I HAVE A PROBLEM?
-------------------------------------

Amanda is completely unsupported and made available as-is.  However,
you may be able to get useful information in the Amanda mailing lists:

==> To join a mailing list, DO NOT, EVER, send mail to that list.  Send
    mail to <listname>-request@amanda.org, or amanda-lists@amanda.org,
    with the following line in the body of the message:
	subscribe <listname> <your-email-address>


    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.


Share and Enjoy,
The Amanda Development Team