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

[Dan Astoorian]

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.

For the curious, the problems I've hit so far include:

- a permissions issue (initiated by Red Hat in response to SELinux
  stupidity, not a problem in Amanda itself) that prevented Amanda from
  creating indices for XFS backups, making it impossible to restore
  files using amrecover; cf.
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2000179 (this one actually
  had been patched in Fedora, but the fix had not been backported to Red
  Hat Enterprise Linux);

- the Red Hat default shipped configuration having permissions on
  /etc/amanda/DailySet1 that prevented dumps from running (because the
  backup user could not open /etc/amanda/DailySet1/command_file for
  writing, although it's questionable why write permission in the
  configuration directory should be necessary in the first place); cf.
  https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=2038948 ;

- "amrecover" from a remote client running an older release of Amanda
  causing amidxtaped to segfault if the tape device is specified using
  "tapedev" rather than "tpchanger" on the server.

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.).

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)?

Thanks,

-- 
Dan Astoorian, Systems Administrator
Engineering Computing Facility
University of Toronto