What I'm thinking of is you should create one big FAT32 (or NTFS) drive on an external drive for example. Then use batch scripts or some product like Tivoli to copy each user's files to the backup drive. Unplug the drive, remove the hard drive from the case, replace it with another hard drive and bring the backup drive to some safe offsite repository. Continue doing this till you have a few generations of backup drives and can keep a rota. Also, decide how far back you want to go.
Or, grab the free drive copying software that companies like Western Digital give out freely and use it to copy an image of each user's hard drive to a backup drive.
The University of Maryland also has a method for many users to upload data to widely separated servers which are then synchronized to a single master server once or twice daily. I think this concept can function well for backup purposes. No, I'm not thinking of the Amanda product; this is something different...I can't recall the name of it at the moment, but it might serve your needs. I don't know if the technology is proprietary or open sourced.
Bob Cochran Greenbelt, Maryland, USA
Rodolfo J. Paiz wrote:
Hi:
I am faced with what *must* be a very common task: to make backups of user files on several Windows machines to the hard disk of a Linux server. So far I've only been responsible for backing up the servers, and rsync/rsnapshot plus mondo do a beautiful job of that.
However, I am finding it a little difficult to find software that does this well. I do prefer to support open-source if at all possible, and I do prefer zero-cost as this is a small office; but I am able and willing to pay for software as long as the cost is reasonable.
Here's what I've done so far:
1. Amanda (http://www.amanda.org) only seems to do backups to tape, yuck! I definitely want to back up to a hard drive: much faster and much cheaper, and I can then replicate the data store and take it home on my notebook. :-) At most we will have 10GB or 20GB of backups, not terabytes or anything huge.
2. Given that the clients are Windows and I need to automate backups (else they'll never get done), I don't see how I can use rsync and/or similar tools since they don't run on that OS. It seems to me that I need some sort of a client app on Windows that will push the backups to the server. Happy to be corrected if wrong, of course.
3. Bacula (http://www.bacula.org) *looks* pretty complete, but it also looks pretty confusing and complex to set up. It also speaks of difficulties backing up Windows clients. Not very attractive at first sight... does anyone know if it gets easier/nicer later?
4. Arkeia (http://www.arkeia.com) seems to do the trick. Clients for a lot of operating systems, server runs on Linux, even has plug-ins for backing up LDAP, PostgreSQL, Oracle, and others. Waiting for a price quote from them now, hopefully it will be affordable.
Can I get some help/recommendations here? Any five-star products I've missed? Especially any really good, pretty cheap ones?
Cheers,
