Amanda is a great backup system, although it tends to be a bit of a bandwidth hog -- I use rsync over SSH for most daily backups, and then Amanda for full / weekly backups.
Go to the Amanda server and become root. Change to whatever directory you want the files restored to.
root@ns03 amtest]# /usr/sbin/amrecover daily
AMRECOVER Version 2.4.5. Contacting server on localhost ...
220 ns03 AMANDA index server (2.4.5) ready.
200 Access OK
Setting restore date to today (2005-12-14)
200 Working date set to 2005-12-14.
Scanning /var/tmp...
host_0: skipping cruft file, perhaps you should delete it.
200 Config set to daily.
501 Host ns03 is not in your disklist.
Trying host ns03...
200 Dump host set to <MACHINE>.
Trying disk / ...
Trying disk rootfs ...
Can't determine disk and mount point from $CWD '/tmp/amtest'
amrecover> sethost www.kumari.net
200 Dump host set to www.kumari.net.
amrecover> setdisk /home/wkumari
200 Disk set to /home/wkumari.
amrecover> ls
<shows some files!>
amrecover> add <files / directories, etc>
amrecover> extract
Extracting files using tape drive file:/amandatapes/daily on host localhost.
The following tapes are needed: daily3
Restoring files into directory /tmp/amtest
Continue [?/Y/n]? y
Extracting files using tape drive file:/amandatapes/daily on host localhost.
Load tape daily3 now
*** At this point, open another window,, and as user "amanda" do":
amanda:$> /usr/sbin/amtape daily slot 3
amtape: changed to slot 3 on file:/amandatapes/daily
*** Go back to this window...
Continue [?/Y/n/s/t]? y
This can now also be done from the client end -- just run amrecover from there.
If you are using an encrypted backup, you will need to place the correct passphrase in /var/lib/amanda/.am_passphrase