How To Install amanda-client on Debian 10

Learn how to install amanda-client on Debian 10 with this tutorial. amanda-client is Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver (Client)

Introduction

In this tutorial we learn how to install amanda-client on Debian 10.

What is amanda-client

amanda-client is:

Amanda is a backup system designed to archive many computers on a network to a single large-capacity tape drive. This package is suitable for large amounts of data to backup. For smaller solutions take a look at afbackup, tob, …

Features:

  • will back up multiple machines in parallel to a holding disk, blasting finished dumps one by one to tape as fast as they can be can written to tape. For example, a ~2 Gb 8mm tape on a ~240K/s interface to a host with a large holding disk can be filled by Amanda in under 4 hours.
  • built on top of standard backup software: Unix dump/restore, and later GNU Tar and others.
  • does simple tape management: will not overwrite the wrong tape.
  • supports tape changers via a generic interface. Easily customizable to any type of tape carousel, robot, or stacker that can be controlled via the unix command line.
  • for a restore, tells you what tapes you need, and finds the proper backup image on the tape for you.
  • recovers gracefully from errors, including down or hung machines.
  • reports results, including all errors in detail, in email to operators.
  • will dynamically adjust backup schedule to keep within constraints: no more juggling by hand when adding disks and computers to network.
  • includes a pre-run checker program, that conducts sanity checks on both the tape server host and all the client hosts (in parallel), and will send an e-mail report of any problems that could cause the backups to fail.
  • can compress dumps before sending or after sending over the net, with either compress or gzip.
  • can optionally synchronize with external backups, for those large timesharing computers where you want to do full dumps when the system is down in single-user mode (since BSD dump is not reliable on active filesystems): Amanda will still do your daily dumps.
  • lots of other options; Amanda is very configurable.

THIS PACKAGE RELIES ON A RUNNING AMANDA SERVER IN YOUR NETWORK.

For important notes, see /usr/share/doc/amanda-client/README.Debian.

Explanation of suggested programs:

  • gnuplot is needed for plotting statistics of backups

There are three methods to install amanda-client on Debian 10. We can use apt-get, apt and aptitude. In the following sections we will describe each method. You can choose one of them.

Install amanda-client Using apt-get

Update apt database with apt-get using the following command.

sudo apt-get update

After updating apt database, We can install amanda-client using apt-get by running the following command:

sudo apt-get -y install amanda-client

Install amanda-client Using apt

Update apt database with apt using the following command.

sudo apt update

After updating apt database, We can install amanda-client using apt by running the following command:

sudo apt -y install amanda-client

Install amanda-client Using aptitude

If you want to follow this method, you might need to install aptitude first since aptitude is usually not installed by default on Debian. Update apt database with aptitude using the following command.

sudo aptitude update

After updating apt database, We can install amanda-client using aptitude by running the following command:

sudo aptitude -y install amanda-client

How To Uninstall amanda-client on Debian 10

To uninstall only the amanda-client package we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get remove amanda-client

Uninstall amanda-client And Its Dependencies

To uninstall amanda-client and its dependencies that are no longer needed by Debian 10, we can use the command below:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove amanda-client

Remove amanda-client Configurations and Data

To remove amanda-client configuration and data from Debian 10 we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y purge amanda-client

Remove amanda-client configuration, data, and all of its dependencies

We can use the following command to remove amanda-client configurations, data and all of its dependencies, we can use the following command:

sudo apt-get -y autoremove --purge amanda-client

Dependencies

amanda-client have the following dependencies:

References

Summary

In this tutorial we learn how to install amanda-client package on Debian 10 using different package management tools: apt, apt-get and aptitude.