Dave,
> So let's see what the current users have to say. Is a new amanda
> installation still a sane choice in 2020?
I cannot speak for a new installation as I have been using Amanda for
over 2 decades. But for backing up servers, a mix of unixes, I find it
very reliable and dependable.
I have not been using the latest bells and whistles, I have developped
some of my owns to fit my needs 9nice thing part of Amanda is written in
Perl and integrates well with some admin scripts here and there).
I am far from dealing with your amount of servers and data, having about
15 machines and about 10TB. On a 4 cores, 4GB RAM machine, backups take
only a few hours every night, compression being made on the client or on
Amanda backup, about half and half.
> And what kind of hardware specs should I be looking at? Is tape still
> king, or is everyone backing up to hard drives now?
One of my concerns would be the network bandwidth, you'd need at least
10Gbps network to push that amount of data through in one day. That is
where Amanda trying to balance the size of the backup across a cycle may
come handy.
I had been using QIC type of tapes for years and changed for vtapes on
disk about 12 years ago. As I was not satisfied that it could only use
one disk at that time (or I did I misunderstood something), I developped
my own tape changer that could work with multiple independant disks. By
choice, I think that independant disks is better than any RAID thing
that would either waste some storage, or render the array unusable if
any one disk gets faulty.
And since, I have been installing bigger disks in my same server when I
need more space, from 500GB, to 1.5TB, 3TB and lately one 6TB (I tried
with only one because I was not sure the motherboard would recognize
it). The old disks are stored so I can retreive the data from them if
needed, I just have to plug the disk in Amanda server. I have 8 disk
bays, one disk for system, holding disk and a copy of the final state of
the accounts about to be deleted. Another disk for some additional
holding space and a second copy of the deleted accounts and the 6 other
disks for vtapes. Per choice too, I am using smallish vtapes so they are
almost all full, that limits the fragmentation (most of the disks end up
with less than 1M enpty space).
I also use Amanda to backup one Windows machine, through the Samba
method. Amanda is not very well suited to backup workstations when mot
of the users will turn off their machine after work. I don't know if
that is part of your plan, but I have been looking at some solution that
would run on the user's workstation and that would push a backup on some
server and use Amanda to keep a backup of that server.
One think I implemented a long time ago is a replication of Amanda
configuration and indexes: at the end of each dump, I push a copy of
that data with rsync and also send that information to me by email
(email being replicated automatically on the email server). With the
disks and the indexes, I can manually extract about any backup from a
machine that would not even have Amanda running. I choose to use tar
rather than dump for that compatibility advantage.
Best regards,
Olivier
