[3]: 125-147 Amanda was initially developed at the University of Maryland and is released under a BSD-style license.

It includes a management graphical user interface (GUI) and other features such as scheduler, plugin framework, and an optional cloud backup service support.

The cloud backup option uses the Amazon S3 service from Amazon Web Services as the cloud storage provider and enables safe offsite storage of the Amanda backup data.

The plugin framework allows for application-specific backups and is used by Amanda Enterprise to support applications such as Oracle database, Samba network share, NDMP, etc.

Amanda Enterprise also supports image-level backup of live virtual machine running on VMware infrastructure.