How To Install amanda-server on Ubuntu
Posted on April 1, 2023 (Last modified on May 20, 2023 )
4 minutes • 676 words
Introduction
In this tutorial we learn how to install amanda-server on Ubuntu.
What is amanda-server
amanda-server is:
Amanda is a backup system designed to archive many computers on a network to a single large-capacity tape drive. This package is suitable for large amounts of data to backup. For smaller solutions take a look at afbackup, tob, …
Features:
- will back up multiple machines in parallel to a holding disk, blasting finished dumps one by one to tape as fast as they can be written to tape. For example, a ~2 Gb 8mm tape on a ~240K/s interface to a host with a large holding disk can be filled by Amanda in under 4 hours.
- built on top of standard backup software: Unix dump/restore, and later GNU Tar and others.
- does simple tape management: will not overwrite the wrong tape.
- supports tape changers via a generic interface. Easily customizable to any type of tape carousel, robot, or stacker that can be controlled via the unix command line.
- for a restore, tells you what tapes you need, and finds the proper backup image on the tape for you.
- recovers gracefully from errors, including down or hung machines.
- reports results, including all errors in detail, in email to operators.
- will dynamically adjust backup schedule to keep within constraints: no more juggling by hand when adding disks and computers to network.
- includes a pre-run checker program, that conducts sanity checks on both the tape server host and all the client hosts (in parallel), and will send an e-mail report of any problems that could cause the backups to fail.
- can compress dumps before sending or after sending over the net, with either compress or gzip.
- can optionally synchronize with external backups, for those large timesharing computers where you want to do full dumps when the system is down in single-user mode (since BSD dump is not reliable on active filesystems): Amanda will still do your daily dumps.
- lots of other options; Amanda is very configurable.
For important notes, see /usr/share/doc/amanda-server/README.Debian.
Explanation of suggested programs:
- perl is needed for some non essential server utilities
- gnuplot is needed for plotting statistics of backups
- to backup the tape server, you need to install the client too
There are three methods to install amanda-server on Ubuntu. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.
Install amanda-server Using apt-get
Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.
sudo apt-get update
After updating apt database, We can install amanda-server using apt-get by running the following command:
sudo apt-get -y install amanda-server
Install amanda-server Using apt
Update apt database with apt using the following command.
sudo apt update
After updating apt database, We can install amanda-server using apt by running the following command:
sudo apt -y install amanda-server
Install amanda-server Using aptitude
If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Ubuntu. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.
sudo aptitude update
After updating apt database, We can install amanda-server using aptitude by running the following command:
sudo aptitude -y install amanda-server
How To Uninstall amanda-server on Ubuntu
To uninstall only the amanda-server package we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get remove amanda-server
Uninstall amanda-server And Its Dependencies
To uninstall amanda-server and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Ubuntu, we can use the command below:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove amanda-server
Remove amanda-server Configurations and Data
To remove amanda-server configuration and data from Ubuntu we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y purge amanda-server
Remove amanda-server configuration, data, and all of its dependencies
We can use the following command to remove amanda-server configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:
sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge amanda-server
Dependencies
amanda-server have the following dependencies:
References
Summary
In this tutorial we learn how to install amanda-server package on Ubuntu using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.