AMANDA, the Advanced Maryland Automatic Network Disk Archiver, is a backup solution that allows the IT administrator to set up a single master backup server to back up multiple hosts over network to tape drives/changers or disks or optical media. Amanda uses native utilities and formats (e.g. dump and/or GNU tar) and can back up a large number of servers and workstations running multiple versions of Linux or Unix. Amanda uses a native Windows client to back up Microsoft Windows desktops and servers.