Amanda, or the 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 and includes:

the backup server and client itself

a tape server

an index server

All three servers do not necessarily need to run on the one machine.

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 Linux based systems. Amanda supports Windows systems using Samba or Cygwin.

Amanda supports both tape based and disk based backup, and provides some useful functionality not available in other backup products.

Major releases

The most recent stable release is version 2.5.2p1, released on June 6, 2007.