In my home I have a media server running boxee, samba, and various other services. The media server has a 1TB hard drive storing our media (dvds, pictures, etc) and a couple of samba shares. On the same server is one 2TB hard drive.

I would like to backup the 1tb hard drive (media + samba shares) as well as my laptop and my wife's laptop (on the network) onto the 2TB drive.

I've read quite a bit about Amanda and it seems like an amazing backup solution. However, most everything I have read deals with tapes and large amounts of data. I know Amanda can back up to hard drives just fine, I just haven't found much documentation about it.

Is Amanda a good choice for my situation? If not, what would you recommend? If Amanda is a good choice, do you know of any links to a similar setup as mine?

Thanks for your time,
Chris

I have the same setup as yours and I used Rsnapshot. It's simple and easy to use. It uses incremental backup over the network which copies only the portion which has changed since the full backup has been created.

Whether or not Amanda is overboard in your situation depends in part on whether you want to try it. While the real payoff is in larger networked environments, I do know people who only backup one or a couple of computers using Amanda, and backup to disk is becoming much more common.

Check out http://wiki.zmanda.com/index.php/Quick_start. There is a reference to setting up a quick test environment for disk based backup. You could also check out the links at http://www.linuxquestions.org/bookmarks/tags/backup, although you said you've already read quite a bit. Also, those links need to be updated. Amanda has seen a lot of development in the last couple of years.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you for your replies. I'm more than happy to learn about Amanda and take the time to set something good up. I just don't want it to be too over my head and as a consequence I mess up my backups. I'll check out Rsnapshot as well and let you know how it goes.

Thanks,
Chris