Howdy, all! We've recently had some problems at work with our backup provider, so my boss has come to me and requested a recommendation for bringing backups in-house. I've previously adminned a small amanda installation back in 2000-2006 and I quite liked the system and how it works, so that was my first thought.
I've done some general web searches and it looks like the situation today isn't as good as it was a decade and a half ago - not a lot of active development, limited support for Windows clients, etc. But, on the other hand, amanda was already a very mature system back then, so I don't know that a lot of ongoing development would still be needed. So let's see what the current users have to say. Is a new amanda installation still a sane choice in 2020? My use case is that I'll be backing up somewhere in the neighborhood of 75ish servers, a mix of physical and (mostly) virtual machines, and a mix of mostly Linux with some Windows and one or two FreeBSD. Total disk usage is currently in the 35-40 TB range, growing by maybe 1-2 TB per year. Aside from my own positive experiences with amanda, both I and my boss (and most of my coworkers) are very pro-open-source. If amanda isn't a reasonable choice for that scenario, what would be a better option? And what kind of hardware specs should I be looking at? Is tape still king, or is everyone backing up to hard drives now? -- Dave Sherohman
