I came into an existing Amanda environment what I started this job 22 years ago. Amanda has been upgraded numerous times on many platforms, and while we have migrated away from SGI clients we continue to have Solaris clients and several flavors of linux. Backup servers vary between Solaris and linux, we have upgraded tape drives and jukeboxes and use VTape on several of our Amanda servers.
Amanda has never been problematic and has saved us on numerous occasions. Admittedly we are back rev and have not used some of the newer features, but have made good use of tape flush parameters, jukebox and vtape control and have never had difficulty with cross platform issues (taking into account OS/filesystem specific native tools). Brian Cuttler Wadsworth Center/NYS Department of Health -----Original Message----- From: owner-amanda-us...@amanda.org <owner-amanda-us...@amanda.org> On Behalf Of Debra S Baddorf Sent: Friday, September 25, 2020 2:09 PM To: Dave Sherohman <d...@sherohman.org> Cc: Debra S Baddorf <badd...@fnal.gov>; amanda-users@amanda.org Subject: Re: How's amanda feeling these days? ATTENTION: This email came from an external source. Do not open attachments or click on links from unknown senders or unexpected emails. I've had an amanda “world” running for 15 or 20 years. I have 33 unix nodes, of varying flavors of unix. They play together nicely, though you can’t unpack a file on a different flavor of unix. I think you can with TAR rather than DUMP. And, since many of my disks are big, I’m using a lot of TAR, to split them into smaller chunks — which have grown in size as my tape drive has been upgraded over time. We still use physical tape. I keep 70 days of backups (inc every day, full once a week) and a separate config for archival fulls once a month. 10-12 times your amount of data (fulls once a week) might be rather a lot of disk space, but I haven’t compared. Someone else recently discussed the large cost of using cloud space. I’m not doing any Windows backups; we have another group that does those. I’m happy with amanda’s current capabilities. In fact, I’m not running the most recent versions of amanda, not wanting the effort of changing for features I won’t use. My data size is a bit over 30 TB, since my archival fulls now require a second LT05 tape, one of which claims 30 TB capacity. Another data point - Deb Baddorf Fermilab > On Sep 25, 2020, at 8:19 AM, Dave Sherohman <d...@sherohman.org> wrote: > > 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
