Every company requires a large-capacity tape backup utility that is fast, stable, and can scale from a small number of workstations right up to an entire network. Take a look at “Amanda,” a highly useful technology alternative that fulfills such a need.

What Is Amanda?

The Advanced Maryland Automated Network Disk Archiver (a.k.a. “Amanda”) is open source software that lets IT configure large numbers of client desktops to a single backup drive through a single master server. Amanda backs up data from multiple hosts to either disk or tape. Amanda can back up large numbers of workstations running various flavors of Linux, UNIX, Mac OS X, and Windows operating systems.

Amanda was originally deployed in universities and other research-intensive organizations as a cheap, reliable backup system. Since the advent of widespread Linux adoption in private industry, the number of Amanda installations has grown considerably.