Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver

Amanda, or the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver is an open source computer archiving tool that is able to back up data residing on multiple computers on a network. It uses a client-server model and includes:
* the backup server and client itself
* a tape server
* an index server

All three servers do not necessarily need to run on the one machine.

Amanda was initially developed at the University of Maryland and is released under a BSD-style license [http://www.amanda.org/copyright.php] . Amanda is available both as a free community edition and fully supported enterprise edition. Amanda runs on almost any Unix or Linux based systems. Amanda supports Windows systems using Samba or Cygwin. A native Win32 client (with support for open files) is also now available. [http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Zmanda_Windows_Client]

Amanda supports both tape based and disk based backup, and provides some useful functionality not available in other backup products. [http://amanda.zmanda.com/]

Among its key features is an intelligent scheduler which optimizes use of computing resources across backup runs.

Major releases

The most recent stable release is version 2.6.0p2, released on August 26th 2008. [http://www.zmanda.com/amanda-26-released.html] [http://archives.zmanda.com/amanda-archives/viewtopic.php?t=4317&sid=20d32568e87a03aa955cdebfe0eb78bb]

External links

* [http://www.amanda.org/ Official site]
* [http://forums.zmanda.com/ Amanda Forums]
* [http://www.karakas-online.de/myAMANDA/ Using Amanda to backup vfat filesystems]
* [http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/esa3/chapter/ch11.pdf Online chapter from OReilly book]