I moved from a fairly complex script of my own to Amanda a couple of years ago. Setting up Amanda wasn’t that difficult. Once it was set up, its intelligent planner, parallelism, and fault tollerance have resulted in all my backups being centralized and self managed. I get emails telling me what it has done. I periodically check up on it to see what it is doing. And, if I need to recover something, it is extremely easy.

When my tape library failed, Amanda continued working. It evaluated available holding disk space and dropped back to incremental only backups. When the tape library was back online, Amanda automatically flushed the incrementals to tape and started scheduling fulls to catch up. I never had to touch Amanda, and I was covered for backups.

For more advantages or reasons to like Amanda, see .

maltamir made an important point when he said, If I want a command-line, open-source, file-level backup, I’ll just write a tar archive to an NFS mount. Utilities like fsdump and rsync are powerful tools for this; add buffer inline to tar and ssh and you have streaming tape backups.

What I’m asking, I guess, is, what makes Amanda more useful (read: worth the extra management effort) than a couple of shell scripts?

I then looked at backuppc with its web based console, once set-up it was brilliant. If you want a web based backup system that can backup Linux, Windows and Mac have a look at backuppc.

I generally always go for a handwritten script but amanda can be useful if set up right…

If you can get the FSF to agree that NDMP is compatible with the GPL license, then you may have a point, otherwise, please realize “open” standard does not necessarily mean Open Source compatible.