Re: How's amanda feeling these days?

I'm running Amanda 3.5.1 on 3 backup servers in 3 different departments. One of them is on the small 
side and still running LTO6 in an Overland tape library with 1 drive. The other 2 are sizeable in 
terms of data, but small in terms of servers. Roughly half a dozen Linux Ubuntu 16.04 servers each, 
but with around 100TB of storage capacity more than half filled. One of the two has a fair bit of 
highly compressible data, while the other has a fair bit of highly uncompressible data. They are 
both running with dual LTO7 tape drives in Overland tape libraries. Backups every night of the week 
with fulls at least once a week. Lots of manual splitting of DLEs. The one with the compressible 
data keeps up fairly well. The one with uncompressible data ends up not being able to do everything 
periodically, and I have to deal with it manually. I let the LTO7 do the compression. It is 
important with my setups. The gzip processes were eating up my servers, and things run much faster 
with the LTO7 compression.


On 9/25/20 9:19 AM, Dave Sherohman wrote:
> Howdy, all!
>
> We've recently had some problems at work with our backup provider, so my
> boss has come to me and requested a recommendation for bringing backups
> in-house.  I've previously adminned a small amanda installation back in
> 2000-2006 and I quite liked the system and how it works, so that was my
> first thought.
>
> I've done some general web searches and it looks like the situation
> today isn't as good as it was a decade and a half ago - not a lot of
> active development, limited support for Windows clients, etc.  But, on
> the other hand, amanda was already a very mature system back then, so I
> don't know that a lot of ongoing development would still be needed.
>
> So let's see what the current users have to say.  Is a new amanda
> installation still a sane choice in 2020?
>
> My use case is that I'll be backing up somewhere in the neighborhood of
> 75ish servers, a mix of physical and (mostly) virtual machines, and a
> mix of mostly Linux with some Windows and one or two FreeBSD.  Total
> disk usage is currently in the 35-40 TB range, growing by maybe 1-2 TB
> per year.  Aside from my own positive experiences with amanda, both I
> and my boss (and most of my coworkers) are very pro-open-source.
>
> If amanda isn't a reasonable choice for that scenario, what would be a
> better option?
>
> And what kind of hardware specs should I be looking at?  Is tape still
> king, or is everyone backing up to hard drives now?
>
-- 
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Chris Hoogendyk

-
    O__  ---- Systems Administrator, Retired
   c/ /'_ --- Biology & Geosciences Departments
  (*) \(*) -- 315 Morrill Science Center III
~~~~~~~~~~ - University of Massachusetts, Amherst

<[email protected]>

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Erdös 4