Amanda - enhanced by avalaris

AMANDA stands for "Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver" and originally started as a project at the University of Maryland. Meanwhile, the multi-functional backup solution is developed and enhanced by a worldwide community.

Amanda is free software, open source, which has the advantage that no license expenses have to be made. Configured meticulously, the program is a cheap and reliable alternative to commercial software. avalaris has enhanced this backup solution and extended it with new features.

The point of intersection, where everything meets, is the Amanda backup server. It saves all the data from the other computers in the network. The backups are put on magnetic tapes or more convenient on the hard disc, according to the requirements. For an extended automation, so-called "tape changers" can be installed without any problems.

Originally, Amanda was just meant to work on UNIX operating systems (Linux, BSD, AIX, a.s.o.), but meanwhile is employed more and more on both, Windows- and Apple Mac OS X clients as well. Thus, a broad spectrum of operating systems is supported and can easily be involved in the backup solution.

avalaris has broadened Amanda with some useful features, in order to assure greatest possible comfort and best software functionality. Usually, backups from the server are started once a day – this happens mostly during the night. Naturally this possibility is available in our enhanced version of the product.

What's really new is the possibility to initiate a backup automatically with shutdown of the client. Thus, computers don't have to be online throughout the night, in order to assure a regular backup scheme. By this, the durability of the computers is enhanced and energy expenses can be cut considerably. If the client is needed while the backup is running, the backup can be discontinued at any time without losing data.

Furthermore, Amanda offers a lot of additional configuration settings, which can be adjusted to the particular requirements: the number of tapes, the range/intervals between backups and schedules as to what data should be saved - they can all be arranged individually. Apart from that, one has the possibility to choose, whether data should be stored uncompressed or in a space saving compressed version.

The exposure to huge amounts of data requires secure backup systems, one can rely on without ifs and buts.

Play it safe with the avalaris-enhanced version of Amanda.

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