I understand your reaction, and I would likely have posted
something similar during my first week or so with Amanda,
but I'm a lurker by nature. I figured the answer would show
itself sooner or later. I've had all of my questions answered
and then some. This is one of the most information rich and
forgiving lists I've ever seen, and I've been subscribing to
mailing lists of all kinds since 1987.

Yes, Amanda seems weird at first take, especially to people
like me with lots of experience using conventional backup
software. I find this very similar to the financial establishment's
take on the Google IPO.

Amanda is outside the box on many aspects of planning for
backups. I was very resistant to it at first, being used to lots
of up-front definitions which almost always needed revision
later in conventional backup software. That is, most of the
commercial backup software forces you to make decisions
before you really know what you're doing. My experience
has been that of forced failure. Kind of like an enforced
first draft, which I've had to throw away once I knew
enough about how the software worked to make a working
plan.

In my Amanda experience, I was lucky enough to have a
large holding disk area and a tape drive which failed
spectacularly before even one backup was flushed. It gave
me the opportunity to see how Amanda works. The most
wonderful aspect was how happy "she" was to restore
from the holding disk.

I still don't totally grok Amanda. I dump by hand about once
a week. That totally works for me. I have two servers, one
local, one very remote, and both have enough holding disk
for two weeks of backups at Amanda's discretion. I
noticed that the older backups were conveniently rolled off
of the holding disk when I forgot to dump to tape for a
while.

I root for Amanda for the same reason I'm rooting for Google.
Both shrug off convention, and both provide an excellent
product to the world for free. I don't totally understand either
one, but I believe that neither is evil.