Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver

Amanda, previously known as Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver is an open source computer archiving tool that is able to back up data residing on multiple computers on a network. It uses a client–server model, where the server contacts each client to perform a backup at a scheduled time.

Amanda was initially developed at the University of Maryland and is released under a BSD-style license. Amanda is available both as a free community edition and fully supported enterprise edition. Amanda runs on almost any Unix or Unix-like systems. Amanda supports Windows systems using Samba or a native Win32 client with support for open files.

Amanda supports both tape-based and disk-based backup, and provides some useful functionality not available in other backup products. Amanda supports tape-spanning - i.e. if a backup set does not fit in one tape, it will be split into multiple tapes.

Among its key features is an intelligent scheduler which optimizes use of computing resources across backup runs.

The most recent stable release is version 3.3.9, which was released on February 10, 2016.

Amanda Enterprise Edition is a commercial version of Amanda which has been developed by Zmanda. It includes a management GUI—Zmanda Management Console (ZMC)—and other features such as scheduler, plugin framework, and also an optional cloud backup service support. The cloud backup option uses the Amazon S3 service from Amazon Web Services as the cloud storage provider and enables safe offsite storage of the Amanda backup data. The plugin framework allows for application-specific backups and is used by Amanda Enterprise to support applications such as Oracle database, Samba network share, NDMP, etc. Amanda Enterprise also supports image-level backup of live VMs running on VMware infrastructure.