Amanda: 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. It is built on top of standard backup software: Unix dump/restore, GNU Tar and others, so it possible to restore from a backup tape even if Amanda is not installed. 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. Other features include: * 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. * 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. WWW: ${HOMEPAGE}