On Fri, 21 Jan 2005, 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, If you can tolerate sticking a CD into the Windows boxes and booting partimage you can backup an image of each partition across the network or to a secondary drive. partimage doesn't care what filesystem is being used. It works with linux, NTFS, FAT32... A restore works perfectly by simply overwriting the existing partition. -- Gerry "The lyfe so short, the craft so long to learne" Chaucer
