Amanda On Unix: How To Start Fresh Tape Set Brief look at free Amanda tape backup sw

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Amanda is a free sourceforge project for sysadmins running UNIX/Linux/BSD (typically on servers) who don't want to pay a gazillion dollars to buy canned tape backup software. Amanda is not easy, but it is reliable, catalogs backups, and can backup multiple servers over a network to one tape drive according to a schedule.Here's how I might initiate a fresh set of tapes. Assume that Amanda has been installed to /usr/local/etc/amanda by me/you, that SetA is the name of the tape set you want to use (maybe a dozen DLTs), and that we'll start fresh and not worry about old catalogs or tape contents.This should be self-explanatory to anyone who has run UNIX servers with Samba 3. We keep all our users' Samba contents under directory /Staff.1. "su - amanda" to do everything as amanda2. List directory /staff [what I want to backup] in /usr/local/etc/amanda/SetA/disklist [in this config dir this lists what to backup]3. Edit /usr/local/etc/amanda/SetA/amanda.conf to name tapes SetA-[A-Z] per the man pages4. Rename /usr/local/etc/amanda/SetA/tapelist to /usr/local/etc/amanda/SetA/tapelist.old[date] to clear the current list of backup tapes5. Use "amlabel SetA SETA-[A-Z]" to relabel the set of tapes in sequence. Update the physical and electronic labels concurrently6. Use "crontab -e" to replace Home with Staff in the latter two lines of amanda's cron jobsAs with most UNIX sourceforge packages, spend considerable time reading and coming to understand the man pages before attempting to install or tweak this package. We run it atop FreeBSD 5.2.1 without problems on a Dell PowerEdge 2500 Server. It periodically backups up over 100GB of Samba-hosted files for our 50+ users. Aside from occasional tweaks, all we have to do is swap tapes daily, taking a recent tape offsite once a week in case the place burns down. < 5% of my time.