[u-u] Is anyone still using Amanda for backups?

[D. Hugh Redelmeier]

| From: Dan Astoorian <djast at ecf.utoronto.ca>

| Just curious... is anyone out there still using Amanda for their
| backups?
| 
| The reason I ask is because I recently migrated our Amanda configuration
| from CentOS 7 (Amanda 3.3.3) to a AlmaLinux 8 server (Amanda 3.5.1), and
| ran into several issues--some RedHat-specific--that I find it difficult
| to believe nobody else had encountered and reported.

This observation justifies your question.

I have no answer.

SELinux is a crazy system that has been made to work via tremendous
effort.  There is a constant need for maintenance.

In my desktop world, I think that I get any benefit with little
effort on my part.  But I do run into snags once in a while.

The SELinux maintainers have been very responsive.  They started at NSA 
but moved to Red Hat.

| I've also run into other minor issues that don't directly impact
| Amanda's functionality, but do serve to undermine my faith in the system
| as a whole (e.g., frequent "Segmentation fault (core dumped)" incidents
| following file restores, cases where I've had to hit Ctrl-D for a
| restore to proceed despite there being no prompt, etc.).

That would be a veto for me unless a fix were quickly forthcoming.
And it would remain a blot on its copybook.

| Furthermore, it looks to me like there hasn't been any active
| development since Amanda 3.5.1 was released (December 2017).
| 
| Was code quality/testing for Amanda always this bad?  Has the open
| source version of Amanda devolved into abandonware?  Should I be
| considering alternatives (e.g., Bacula)?

One reason to use Red Hat stuff (AlmaLinux mostly counts) is that they
maintain the stuff that they distribute.  They very rarely stop
distributing something within a release.

Still, a live upstream is very useful and comforting.