I am considering using the amanda application to provide data and tape backups for a couple of important servers. The basic setup would have clients installed on both Windows and Linux machines and then have amanda write the backed up data to a tape.

Does anyone have any praise, criticisms, or opinions considering this software package? Thanks in advance.

Check out the top link on "Ten Things I Like About Amanda" here:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/bookmarks/tags/backup

At work, we dumped amanda in favor of bacula. Just easier to work with and so far has been more dependable.

Leandean, when and why did you do that? And what was your environment?

I've had no problems at all with Amanda. And Amanda has saved my butt a couple of times. Once when I had a tape drive failure, I was focused on the hardware tech support and troubleshooting and repairing the tape drive for a couple of days. Amanda automatically adjusted its strategy, dropped back to incrementals that would fit on the holding disk, and did the backups. When I had the tape drive up and running again, Amanda automatically loaded the proper tape from the library and flushed the holding disk to tape along with the next backup, which it adjusted to catch up on fulls. I never had to interact with Amanda at all. It just did the right thing, and refused to fail just because the tape drive failed. That's my definition of dependable.