Creating an Ubuntu backup server with AMANDA – sort of…

I was recently tasked with looking at a few different solutions to backup business critical servers at my work. We were using Acronis and it was working perfectly but we were about to expand and would require a lot more licenses so it seemed to make sense to look at open source solutions.
We decided to take a punt on Amanda which bills itself as “the most popular open source backup and recovery software in the world.”
I went ahead and downloaded the latest version from Sourceforge (3.3.9) onto a fresh install of Ubuntu 14.04. These are the steps I used to get it set up.

Prerequisites

First things first, you need to install a few packages to make sure you can install Amanda.

sudo apt-get install build-essential gnuplot libglib2.0-dev

Then you can go ahead and grab a copy of the source to start installing it

wget http://downloads.sourceforge.net/project/amanda/amanda%20-%20stable/3.3.9/amanda-3.3.9.tar.gz
cd amanda-3.3.9/
./configure
make
sudo make install

After the last command finishes, you can check that it installed successfully by running:

amadmin --version

You should then see the version of Amanda that you just installed printed out.
After that, I got completely stuck. No tutorials could get me going again. I couldn’t find the right config files, I could test anything. I got frustrated and gave up! Something I very rarely do. I decided to give Bareos a try instead.