Advantages of Amanda over Proprietary Backup
View the "Advantages of Amanda over Proprietary Backup" White Paper 
Are you using a proprietary backup solution such as NetBackup, NetWorker, or TSM? Why consider an alternative? One reason is to get out from under the burden of vendor lock-in. For example, vendors use proprietary tools and data formats to force you into sticking with their solution. So how is Amanda any better? Amanda uses industry standard tools (tar and dump) and data layouts. Because of this your data is recoverable, even without using Amanda tools.
Amanda tape layout is illustrated below:
When Amanda writes the output of a backup to tape it does not alter the output in any significant way. Because of this you can always recover the data using a native tool, should that be necessary.
Amanda even goes the extra mile - it precedes each tar or dump output with a header of a given size (typically 32K). The header documents the exact command sequence needed to restore the data with standard operating system utilities (e.g. tar or dump). No other backup product provides this ability.
Learn More
The rest of this white paper will show you how Amanda compares with commercial software packages in the following ways:
-
- Amanda is an open source product, while the others are closed-source
- Amanda determines the backup level for a given dump, rather than you having to determine this ahead of time.
- Amanda uses standard backup tools and data layouts (GNU tar, dump, Schilly tar), instead of proprietary ones.
- Backup to disk is integral to Amanda's operation.
- A holding disk is used to temporarily store backup data on the Amanda server.
- Amanda supports open source and user configurable encryption and data compression, while other solutions force you to use their encryption and compression routines.
To download the complete white paper, which discusses these settings in detail, and to have access to other valuable Amanda resources just register,free of charge,to the Zmanda Network.
