Amanda 2.6 - A major new release of the Open Source Backup Software

by Chander Kant

Amanda is the most popular open source backup and recovery software in the world, protecting more than half a million servers and desktops running various versions of Linux, UNIX, BSD, Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems. Amanda allows system administrators to set up a centralized backup server to back up multiple hosts to a tape- or disk-based storage system.

The Amanda development community espouses a relatively conservative development philosophy, which is a must-have feature for backup software! Amanda 2.6.0 was released on April 1st 2008 (no, this is not a joke!) almost on the second anniversary of the release of Amanda 2.5.0. Of course, there were many maintenance releases and patches during that time.

Amanda 2.6.0 represents a huge step forward in Amanda's evolution - improving ease of installation and configuration, security, and scalability. Furthermore, this release makes Amanda a platform to develop advanced backup and archiving applications and makes it easier for developers to contribute significant functionality.

Summary of the new features in Amanda 2.6.0

Ease of installation and configuration:

Two new tools have been added to Amanda to simplify configuration: amserverconfig and amaddclient. amserverconfig utilizes one of the several available configuration templates and constructs an Amanda configuration specifically for backup to disk, a single tape drive, or a tape library. amaddclient is provided to quickly add a new client (i.e. a protected system) to an Amanda configuration - a common task for a backup administrator.

Security enhancements:

In recent months security of the backup environment has been a heated topic. Amanda has always been known for its robust security. Amanda 2.6.0 adds two new tools to help users configure symmetric or public-key GPG encryption for backup data: amcryptsimple and amgpgcrypt.

Performance enhancements:

Amanda 2.6.0 comes with a new algorithm that improves index (aka catalog) lookup speed by up to a factor of 10. This means that in large installations with many clients and large amounts of backup data it will generally take only a few seconds to find all of the information required to recover a specific file. This has become especially important since Amanda is being deployed in ever larger installations, e.g. with hundreds of backup clients and terabytes of backed up data.

Device Management:

Version 2.6.0 comes with significant updates to Amanda's device management. Users now have better control over how data moves from the holding disk to the ultimate backup storage media. This release also introduces the new data transfer architecture (XFA), whose goal is to improve bandwidth, allow concurrent transfer, and (in near future) enable site-specific data migration.

Robustness:

Amanda 2.6.0 comes with a new utility to verify the recoverability of backup images: amcheckdump. amcheckdump, which replaces amverify and amverifyrun, is a flexible tool that verifies the recoverability of backup images by actually running them through the archiving application (e.g. tar). Additionally, Amanda developers have added approximately 200 unit tests to check internal workings of the Amanda core and its various modules - enabling system administrators, for instance, to perform sanity checks before deploying on a new platform.

Amanda: Backup, Recovery and Archiving Platform

The Amanda community has been working extensively on APIs which will make Amanda an ideal platform for many categories of developers: such as those who write business applications that need backup or who want to use new types of storage media as backup targets.

As a first step, Amanda 2.6.0 ships with the new device API. This (of course, open) API allows developers to easily integrate new kinds of storage devices with Amanda. In fact, as part of this implementation Amanda developers integrated Amanda with Amazon S3. Hence, with 2.6.0 you can use Amazon S3 as a target for backups with Amanda. Further examples of storage targets that can now be integrated with Amanda using the Device API include everything from FTP servers to the rumored Google Disk!

The next stage of platform development will be the release of the Application API, which is being actively worked on, and is expected to be released in the next few months. The Application API will enable developers to quickly integrate backup of any application with Amanda.

Resources

Amanda 2.6.0 is available for download now. Amanda has a community written and maintained documentation on the Amanda wiki and community help is available on the Amanda forums as well as on the Amanda users mailing list.