Considering switching from bacula to amanda, have a couple of questions

[vmos2]

We're currently using bacula to backup our servers, we've got debian, ubuntu and windows operating systems over a few hundred servers and we're backing up to a couple of big fat disk arrays.
There have been a few niggly issues with bacula and we've just dicovered another that will mean we have to reinstall the client on most of our servers.
I've been looking into alternatives and so far Amanda is the only reasonable looking candidate that doesn't cost a fat fortune.

I have a couple of questions though.

1 - Am I right in saying that amanda can't run more than one backup job at a time?

2 - we found out that bacula was checking timestamps so that if you moved a file into the backup folder and that file was older than the last backup then bacula would ignore it. We figured out how to get bacula to compare a list of what it had backed up against what's currently in the directory.
Can amanda do this?

3 - we've had occasion to transfer backup archives from one backup server to another and/or restore to a client other than the one that the backup was taken from. Is this possible with Amanda?

4 - we wouldn't want to suddenly switch from one to the other. Is it possible to run the two systems on the same server?

[paddy]

Amanda can run multiple backup jobs but only one backup job for each configuration.

Amanda uses gnutar for determining the list of files to be backed up. So it will also ignore files that are older than the last backup.

You can move backup archives from one server to another. You will have to move the catalogs also if you want to recover using the catalog. Otherwise, you will have to use recovery tools that do not use the catalog. You can restore to a different client (not the original machine).

You can have multiple configurations on the same server.

[vmos2]

Thanks for your reply, but I have put my hand up here

Amanda can run multiple backup jobs but only one backup job for each configuration.

I don't actually know what you mean by one job per configuration. Can it backup more than one server at a time?

Amanda uses gnutar for determining the list of files to be backed up. So it will also ignore files that are older than the last backup.

is there any way around that at all?