The Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver

Copyright (c) 1997, 1998 University of Maryland at College Park, All Rights Reserved.
Portions copyrighted by individual contributers, see the distribution for details.

What is Amanda?

The most recent beta release is version 2.6.1b2, released on December 24, 2008. Download here!

Release Notes:

• Application API: Allow to easily write wrappers around any backup program, See the 'amanda-applications' man page.
• amgtar: Use GNU tar, it is a lot more configurable than the GNUTAR program. See 'amgtar' man page.
• amstar: Use star to do a backup, it work only on a partition. See 'amstar' man page.
• amsamba: Use smbclient to backup a cifs share, see amsamba man page.
• amzfs-sendrecv: Do a backup of a ZFS filesystem with 'zfs send'.
• Script API: Allow to run script before and after amanda process, see the 'amanda-scripts' man page.
• amzfs-snapshot: Do a snapshot of a ZFS filesystem, then 'amgtar' application will backup the snapshot. See 'amzfs-snapshot' man page.
• script-email: Simple script to send email. see 'script-email' man page.
• Changer API v2.0: perl-based changer interface supporting concurrent use of multiple devices and changers.
• currently operating in "compatibility mode," calling old changer shell scripts.
• under active development.
• Xfer API: generic library to move and filter data with maximal efficiency.
• can read from and write to arbitrary devices, files, etc.
• only used in some applications.
• Amanda archive format: A simple archive format that an application can use to create backup image.
• 'amarchiver' program to manipulate file in amanda archive format.
• Many improvements to report better error message to user.
• amtape subcommands 'slot prev' and 'slot last' are removed.
• Dozens more perl libraries, with more stable interfaces.
• Many bugs fixed and improvement.
• amgetconf '--client' option to retrieve config from amanda-client.conf on a client.
• Amanda configuration file changes
• new application-tool section
• new script-tool section
• new device section
• new changer section

The most recent stable release is version 2.6.0p2, released on August 28, 2008. Download here!

Release Notes:

• configure --disable-shared doesn't work because perl modules require shared libraries.  Use configure --with-static-binaries to build statically linked binaries.
• 'amverify' and 'amverifyrun' are deprecated and replaced with the new, more flexible 'amcheckdump'
• 'amdd' and 'ammt' are deprecated.
• Some Amanda files are now installed in new "amanda/" subdirectories: libraries are now installed in $libdir/amanda and internal programs are now installed in $libexecdir/amanda. If you mix 2.6.0 and earlier versions with rsh/ssh auth, you need to add an 'amandad_path' to the dumptype and to amanda-client.conf.
• The amandates file, previously at /etc/amandates, is now at $localstatedir/amanda/amandates.  You may want to move your existing /etc/amandates when you upgrade Amanda.
• New 'amcryptsimple', 'amgpgcrypt' - encryption plugins based on gpg.
• New 'amserverconfig', 'amaddclient' - Initial Amanda configuration tools these tools make assumptions, please see man page.
• Many bugs fixed and code rewrite/cleanup
• Speedup in 'amrecover find' and starting amrecover.
• glib is required to compile and run amanda.
• Device API: pluggable interface to storage devices, supporting tapes, vtapes, RAIT, and Amazon S3
• New perl modules link directly to Amanda, to support writing Amanda applications in Perl. Perl module are installed by default in the perl installsitelib directory. It can be changed with 'configure --with-amperldir'.   
• New 'local' security driver supports backups of the amanda server without any network connection or other configuration.
• Almost 200 unit tests are available via 'make installcheck'.
• Amanda configuration file changes
• amanda.conf changes
• flush-threshold-dumped
• flush-threshold-scheduled
•  taperflush
•  device_property
•  usetimestamps default to yes

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