** CAUTION **
 
THE RELEASE OF AMANDA 2.4 BREAKS BACKWARDS COMPATIBILITY WITH
EARLIER AMANDA CLIENTS (PER CHANGES FILE IN THE DISTRIBUTION.) 

WHAT IS AMANDA?
---------------

This is a release of Amanda, the Advanced Maryland Automatic
Network Disk Archiver.  Amanda is a backup system designed to archive many
computers on a network to a single large-capacity tape drive.  

Here are some features of Amanda:

  * written in C, freely distributable.
  * built on top of standard backup software: Unix dump/restore, and
    later GNU Tar and others.
  * will back up multiple machines in parallel to a holding disk, blasting
    finished dumps one by one to tape as fast as we can write files to
    tape.  For example, a ~2 Gb 8mm tape on a ~240K/s interface to a host
    with a large holding disk can be filled by Amanda in under 4 hours. 
  * does simple tape management: will not overwrite the wrong tape.