Software installation

We used amanda software to backup our data. We considered many software but found that this combination of Amanda's features meets our requirements:

• Free. If you have many servers, commercial systems may dramatically increase your solution's total cost.
• Encryption for transfer and storing. Encryption for transport is most important especially if your backup system is located at different location than your servers.
• Advanced planner. While many backup systems provide you only tools to backup and you need to plan your backup strategy by yourself, amanda has an advanced planner that manages backup schedule by itself, including spreading full backups through backup cycles.

Installing Amanda on backup server

Download amanda source from http://sourceforge.net, extract and install as described here at installation instructions. At our article we will describe amanda 2.4.5p1 version.

tar -xzvf amanda-2.4.5p1.tar.gz
cd amanda-2.4.5p1
./configure --with-user=root --with-group=root
make
make install

By default, configuration set for amanda is DailySet1. So copy default configuration files from example/* to /usr/local/etc/amanda/DailySet1/

Preparing kernel for backup servers.

You need to enable several options in your kernel in order to support tape drives and tape exchanger. You can compile-in or use modules to support your system. For security, we recommend to use compiled-in modules and disable modules support at all

You should enable:

• SCSI Tape support
• SCSI Media changer support
• Probe all LUNs on each SCSI device
• SCSI generic support

Also you need to install tape changer software called mtx. You can install it from sources or using your OS package manager.

After installing new kernel and rebooting the server, type 'dmesg' and if everything is configured properly, you should see something like shown below: