This was a mixed Thanksgiving weekend for open source communities. We
had a renewed PR onslaught from proprietary software vendors (“Linux
is anti-commercial“) and even hardball politics.
But there were lot of interesting announcements made: Firefox 1.5,
codenamed “Deer Park” will finally be unwrapped on November 29th (I
have been using the beta, and I love it). Among all this activity and
with little fan-fare, the Amanda project launched its new Wiki and Forums.Amanda
is the world’s most popular open source Backup and Archiving software.
Amanda allows system administrators to set up a single backup server to
back up multiple hosts to a tape- or disk-based storage system. Amanda
uses native dump and/or GNU tar facilities and can back up a large
number of workstations running various versions of Linux, Unix, OS X or
Microsoft Windows operating systems.
Amanda’s developer and user community can easily be characterized as
modest and understated. But given tens of thousands of systems being
protected by Amanda, hundreds of thousands of downloads of the software
and inclusion in every major distribution it is hard not to notice her.
Amanda recently got the Linux Journal Readers’ Choice Award for Favorite Backup System.
O’Reilly considers Amanda one of the
Top
Five Open Source Packages for System Administrators.
The Amanda wiki
represents the logical next step in Amanda’s evolution. It allows for
collaborative enhancement and fine-tuning of documentation enabling
system administrators to help each other. An ever improving open
documentation like this represents yet another huge advantage that open
source projects such as Amanda have over their proprietary counterparts.
Amanda wiki contains Amanda user information, man pages and developer
information. Developer information includes all APIs used in Amanda
between the media and the backup clients. Availability of APIs in the
wiki will help in greater collaboration within the developer
community. The wiki also contains a wishlist
of Amanda features. Some of these planned features include support for
backing up live applications, optimizing disk-based backups and support
for client-initiated backup (e.g. to support mobile devices, which may
not be around at planned backup schedule).
Amanda Forums will be a valuable
tool for Amanda users to exchange data protection techniques in general
and information specific to Amanda. Amanda developers will also find it
useful in discussing new features and API development.
Beta for an upcoming release (2.5.0) of Amanda
came out recently and is available for download here. This long
awaited release incorporates the ability of backups to span multiple
media devices. This feature removes the need for creating multiple
backup entries (disklist entries) to backup large amount of data. This
release is compatible with the earlier Amanda release (2.4.5). This
allows Amanda users to migrate the Amanda backup server to 2.5.0
without migrating Amanda clients (i.e. systems being protected) to
2.5.0. Amanda has a significant installed base, so this rolling upgrade
would help system administrators to upgrade the existing installations.
Recently security of backup process has been a hotly discussed topic.
Encryption of data while it is being moved from a client to a backup
server as well as while it is stored on the backup media is critical
for privacy concerns and compliance requirements.
New security features, such as data encryption support
(done either on the clients or the backup server)
and support for ssh for communication between
backup server & client, help Amanda users in addressing these
issues. The new release also has abstracted
secure communication API that will allow developers to add different
communication plugins between backup server and client.
Overall the focus of the release is on
simplicity of installation, security of communication &
backed up data, and scalability of the backup process.
Links:
Amanda project page
Amanda Wiki
Amanda Forums
About the Author:
Chander Kant is the CEO of Zmanda, Inc. Zmanda provides open source data protection and archiving solutions and services.
If you would like to see your thoughts or experiences with technology published, please consider writing an article for OSNews.
I have been using it for three years now. Works like a charm.
Someone has used Amanda and Bacula and can tell us which is better? I’ve read about both and Bacula seems more professional, but it’s only my feeling. I know Amanda is widely used, but that not means better product.
One thing about Amanda is that it is rock-solid. Sometimes it has worked for me even in face of hardware errors. It doesn’t have a pretty GUI (but I don’t use GUI’s anyway). I have used Bacula a bit, and didn’t see a reason to switch to it.
One big advantage that Amanda has over Bacula is that it uses unix native utilities for storage of data (tar and dump). So, even if Amanda engine is not working you can use your age old tools to recover. Bacula uses its own (somewhat strange) format.
This is considered a big enough advantage at our site.
But Bacula’s founder, Kern Sibbald, is committed to format stability. The format is documented and therefore I think you can read your old taped even in 10,20 years (if your hardware is in place, that is).
There are statically linked restore tools and even a rescue disk so you can do a bare-metal restore.
fs
Can Amanda backups Windows volume? It seems critical on my site.
Yes Amanda can backup Windows. It uses samba to access the windows volumes to be backed up.
Using Samba for Windows is not what I would consider a “Windows backup”. What about sparse files? Backing up windows databases with native tools (Exchange for example)?
fs
I don’t know if this is still the case but in the past Amanda was not able to perform a backup if the data doesn’t fit on one tape. Bacula will handle this case and requests more tapes (or uses your autochanger to change the tape).
fs
Amanda 2.5 has tape spanning feature to go beyond one tape.
In my expirience, Bacula is far more mature project. I spent whole month making Amanda work something, untill one guy suggested to try Bacula.
Amanda is ok for simple backups (when I say simple I don’t mean backup your home dir), but when you need full hard time working backup (couple of sets of tapes, prexec & postexec scripts, different conditional backups, etc…) it’s Bacula. Bacula is even better then some fancy solutions that cost a lot of $$.
Yes, it is a energizer bunny. Good to see some new activity in the project.
Ok, first off, should the title of a section be what’s tossed on at the end as addendum?
Second, I don’t know if I’d say linux is anti-commercial, but many of the zealots certainly are; goes with the whole open source territory. It may promote innovation, but at the cost of commercialism depending on what you want to do with it.
Third, Sleazy politics in the Commiewealth of Taxachusetts? Say it isn’t so… As to the document format, I have to ask: “Does the end user REALLY give a damn?” It’s something I see debated online at length that frankly the average person could really give a rats ass about one way or the other.
Finally, am I the only person who thinks “Open Source” and “Grows Up” contradict each-other? Let’s be honest, the lions share of open source programmers are either career educators or full time students having their life paid for by mommy and daddy; the only money to be made IN open source is through support, something any 18 year old fresh out of highschool being paid minimum wage can do, having the sleazy business major pocket the real money and laughs his way to the bank while the programmer panhandles on streetcorners.
Did you even read the full article?
Anyway, lion share of open source programmers are paid software developers.
“Ok, first off, should the title of a section be what’s tossed on at the end as addendum?”
I think you forgot to click on “Read More”.
I must agree with microsoft. Opensource is anti-commercial and make it impossible to make any income on software as a commercial product.
You can make money on:
1) Selling support services/contracts
2) Selling custimizations to the software
3) Selling traning class’
4) Selling books
These are just a few off the top of my head. FOSS, has a different revenue model. Its based on selling support; rather than shrink wrapped goods.
Some examples would be:
1) Snort
2) Sugar CRM
3) Red Hat
Any ways, just my .02 cents worth.
1, 3 and 4 are all predicated on the assumption that your software is difficult to use, which is hardly a big attraction for people when there are easy-to-use commerical alternatives with just a once-off payment.
2 is also difficult, as a customisation could be considered a derivation of your product, which would put you in trouble if you used the GPL.
You could choose not to use the GPL, but then someone else could take your product, make it easier to use, and sell it one themselves under a proprietary license, essentially destroying your market.
I think open-source is great, I think being able to create dervied works is great, but I think free-of-charge distribution makes it very hard for small programming houses to make money. My ideal license would be open-source, prevent source-distribution, but still allow the distribution of patches and add-ons. That way the original author would be paid by every new user, enabling them to continue working, while a cottage industry could grow up around the product selling add-ons.
The difficulty is legally distinguishing between an add-on and an entirely new product, especially if it becomes possible to re-create the product’s entire source solely from the patches/add-ons.
Open-source is good for infrastructure, indeed it’s preferable. But as for end-user products I’m not convinced. The Nessus story is pretty interesting in this regard: http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/11/26/1629237&tid=172&tid=…
Amanda is okay for what it does. But are there any F/OSS that compare with a full-featured backup app like Veritas?
I don’t know anything that compares with Veritas except TSM, that even surpases it IMHO. But both are comercial products.
Veritas has gone downhill while Amanda is going up.
Most Veritas customers use just basic functionality but pay ridiculous money for licensing and support. Amanda is already rock solid and good enough from functionality perspective. With commercial support for Amanda there will be no need to buy IBM or Veritas backup.
Obviously you have no experience with enterprise class backup systems. There is no comparing Amanda to TSM or Veritas Netbackup period.
That’s what Sun was saying about Linux just a few years back. Today even Sun admits that 90% of their own x64 servers are running Linux and not Solaris.
Finally, am I the only person who thinks “Open Source” and “Grows Up” contradict each-other?
No. Just look at the IQ drain around here when the open source brigade and script kiddies turned up. I’ve seen more sensible and productive warez discussion boards than this place.
Open source versus closed source, or GPL versus proprietory, is no more than one power grab versus another. The real issues have been lost in the noise created by zealots, and is making Microsoft’s position look more reasonable as time goes by. Personally, I think the issues are important and worth discussing so we can advance as a society, and the faux ethithical position of GPL advocates runs counter that as surely as any other sharp business practice.
I find it very interesting how another of these FREE (as in BSD) softwares get credit as the king on the market.
What is it that makes so few BSDsoftwares, in comparison to plenty of GPLsoftwares, so incredibly popular? This time it’s Amanda… congrats..
Hope we’ll see you on Windows soon…
I recently evaluated a bunch of different backup systems.
For enterprises, Bacula appears to be the one to beat.
For backups saved to hd, rsnapshot and rdiff-backup come out on top. Both are based on rsync, use hardlinks, and are easy to use for remote backups.
I ended up choosing rsnapshot because it is easy for scheduled backups and have been using it for about a month without any problems on Debian 3.1.
Also, NEVER trust a backup system without doing your own backup/restore testing. You’d be surprised at the number of backup systems out there that don’t work produce the results you’d expect.
Speaking of which…beware of using the backup system named hdup2, it doesn’t save/restore directory attributes unless you used a patched version of gnu tar (do you really want to patch tar and compile it just for this?).
Thanks. I was just reading these comments in hope of good information. I will give rsnapshot a try because I really need a backup system now that my workspace is 600 MBs, without considering other uses which could make it handle a bigger 3 GBs files or more.
I really like Rsync and rsnapshot should be good.
Now, on the “I use Windows and I love it you open source zealots”. Well, we don’t really have a problem with you preferring Windows. But you have a problem with we developing Open Source tools or using them. So the problem lied in you and still lies in you. You behave as your worst nightmare users for us. You know, those users that sometimes the developers like to complain about.
Few developers bite the bullet and open their firms. So it’s bogus to pretend that you rule your proprietary world.
I just checked the size of my home directory:
– 48 GBs.
Damn.
I really need to think what and how about the backup.
Is anyone else having an annoying problem where save dialogs hang for a few seconds to for ever? I’m using Fedora with gnome. I have this problem on two different boxes so I’m amazed they are talking about a release since this is a pretty major usability bug.
Bacula has native agents for Windows
Bacula stores the catalog in a database (MySQL,PostgreSQL)
Bacula has a MUCH better architecture
Bacula is more scaleable
Restores are easy, both to latest state, and point in time.
Bacula has a very helpful mailing list and community
Bacula can span backups across multiple tapes
Bacula works with tape libraries
Bacula is in active development
Bacula is VERY configurable, but easy to set up in a small environment.
A lot of new features are being developed, like migrating data from disk-based backup to tape, synthetic full backups, and possibly “base level” backups.
Amanda has had a long run, but it’s time to move forward. Bacula is it.
I think you are ignoring that robustness is the most important thing to consider while picking a backup software. This is where Amanda excels. BTW, I find Amanda community to be very helpful as well.
I agree with you 100%. Amanda is definitely the way to go. I also second the comment from another user about people paying too much money to Veritas for limited functionality needs.
Not to forget the transport encryption feature: All traffic between all Bacula daemons can be encrypted with TLS. Data encryption is being worked on.
fs
Amanda 2.5 has encryption as well…
I was doing lots of things on my machine, like:
– downloading a Linux ISO;
– compiling and installing lots of programs with a custom script;
– running rsnapshot with cron;
– had just turned on Samba;
Anyway, something weird happened and my ethernet card is not being detected and I can’t login normally, I had to enter in single user mode (recover mode).
After I reinstall my system (I’m just doing a last backup before doing that), I’m testing Amanda. 🙂
It’s great that Amanda is finally getting the support and momentum it needs!