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I use EMC Dantz Retrospect, Which backs up our notebooks, desktops, and servers, all with snap shot imaging. Check them out http://www.dantz.com/ I haven't been let down yet. We recently lost a SBS 2003 to a hacker, and recovered it without problems, SBS, Exchange, and SQL Server. Retrospect is a life saver.

Nobody seems to have figured out that there are much more difficult things to solve before OS X can "run everywhere": There are no drivers for 99% of the white box hardware out there. This has always been the #1 reason, IMHO, why nobody should have expected a shrinkwrap OS X.

Why would Apple want to get into the same driver morass that M$ is in? If there is a driver problem with Windoze, it looks like a M$ problem, whether it is or not. Hence the certification program. But that doesn't really make life any easier: Imagine the nuisance value for an O/S vendor having to certify and keep track of 100,000 random device drivers... Software support is hard enough just in a niche (for example, imagine Dantz's headaches supporting Retrospect and the endless combinations of host/adapter/drive!) But an O/S vendor has to support every permutation to some degree, or at least give an appearance of caring.

Apple's big win in this area was (like Sun, SGI, and dozens of other high end vendors) was controlling both the hardware design and the O/S, so they only had to support a relatively tiny set of hardware, and they had perfect access to its specifications and often designed it themselves anyway. That perfect integration is not available to generic O/S vendors like M$ - and the difference in end product has always been stark (for those who bothered to compare).

And also, Retrospect already does something like this and has for years. It's not particularly innovative. The interesting thing is detecting identical files. Having the operating system calculate MD5's for you seemed to me the interesting thing.

Dantz Retrospect has a good UI, should be fairly easy for somewhat savvy users.

Get Dantz Retrospect. I've used it for years to backup and restore Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X systems.

I normally use Retrospect Express for desktop backups.

Burns to CDR, fast, super-easy to use, and has some excellent scheduling features.

Dantz Retrospect lets you back up Linux boxes from a Windows or OS X backup server using its own client. They only support RedHat, but they do have a tar.gz that can probably be made to work with Debian. It's what I use to back up my firewall/email/web/everything server. It uses multicast for discovery, so if you put it onto a firewall, you'll need to set up multicast so that the packets are internal instead of on the default (Internet) route for the backup server to see the Linux box.

As mentioned earlier here, there are numerous SSH/SCP implementations for Win32. Search around. They're somewhat hard to find, but there's quite a few (make sure you choose one in active development. There are quite a few abandoned projects with security holes and other bugs). Honestly, I don't remember what one I use on my windows machine :) As a word of advice, do not use a cygwin distribution. They're somewhat buggy and need to run inside cygwin. The 'native' servers which link against some cygwin libraries seem to be allright though.

There's also another easier option. But, it will cost you. Use a "real" backup program such as Retrospect which will do compression and encryption (very strong encryption if you desire) client side. More often then not, this is what big businesses use. You can then safely use smb, ftp, scp, whatever you wish

It even allows you to prepare a boot CD for one machine from a backup-set, hosted by another...

I have the Maxtor 120GB drive. It's fast (USB 2) and works well. It has a button on it that can automatically start a back-up if you're you're too lazy to launch an application in the normal way. It also comes with a surprisingly full featured version of Retrospect 6.0 , which is more than enough for typical back-up tasks.

I've never used that feature, as my primary use of Retrospect is on Macintosh; I have a Windows client, but have not had to try to regenerate it following a total system loss. (And I don't have the add-on to do it anyway.)

But the rest of Retrospect is common across Windows and Mac. (Disaster recovery on Mac seems to be a lot easier.) The important part for this discussion, in addition to the 'disaster recovery CD' add-on, is the way it does a so-called 'snapshot' when it takes an incremental backup. This lets you get both the speed of doing incremental backups, plus the ability to restore a system to precisely the contents it had at that time. (So basically, it can handle deletes too, so it doesn't need to restore files from the full backup which were deleted when a later backup took place.)

I bought Retrospect for Macintosh after Norton 'Crash Gaurd Causes Crashes' Utilities removed their backup/restore software in a newer version. (Fortunately, the id10ts at Symantec offered a satisfaction guarantee on software. The store didn't believe it, they had to place a toll call to Symantec to find out they weren't kidding.)

I've been using Retrospect for Macintosh since System 8 came out, through OS X, and now with a Windows 98 client. It's my very favourite backup program, and what's more, the restores work.

Just need to get the upgrade to 5.1 for Mac so I don't need a separate backup system for my Linux box.

Chassis your Windows drive into a Mac and image/clone it via CarbonCopy Cloner, Retrospect, etc. 100% mirror, no problem.

our Windows guy here has used it at the last few places he's worked, and it provides good backup and disaster recover, you can bun a recovery CD which will reinstall OS and then connect to the backup server and restore the box automatically to it's last (or whichever you tell it to) backup.

YEEEEEeeeeeeess....

You have the option of formatting your drive as case sensitive, if you really want to.

Personally, I'd recommend against it, unless you have a really good reason to choose otherwise. Most Mac apps assume case insensitivity. For instance Dantz has this knowledgebase article regarding Panther and Retrospect. Note the paragraph which reads:

Case-Sensitive HFS+ (Panther Server only)
* Panther Server's Disk Utility allows administrators to format disks with a new case-sensitive HFS Plus file system. Retrospect 5.1 does not recognize case-sensitive file names. If "file" and "FILE" exist in the same directory, only one will be backed up.

Interestingly, they say that this feature is only available on the server edition. Can anyone confirm or disprove this?

YEEEEEeeeeeeess....

You have the option of formatting your drive as case sensitive, if you really want to.

Personally, I'd recommend against it, unless you have a really good reason to choose otherwise. Most Mac apps assume case insensitivity. For instance Dantz has this knowledgebase article regarding Panther and Retrospect. Note the paragraph which reads:

Case-Sensitive HFS+ (Panther Server only)
* Panther Server's Disk Utility allows administrators to format disks with a new case-sensitive HFS Plus file system. Retrospect 5.1 does not recognize case-sensitive file names. If "file" and "FILE" exist in the same directory, only one will be backed up.

Interestingly, they say that this feature is only available on the server edition. Can anyone confirm or disprove this?

With 160GB HD's available for US$100 the space isn't much of an issue. Also Unison is pretty clever about how it updates the files (rsync) so bandwidth use is reasonable enough even for home use.

FWIW For a server I use the free e-smith Red Hat-based distribution which is trivially managed from a web browser. It has a custom Unison rpm available for really simple synchronization setup.

The second suggestion is my other solution; an external drive. A cheapie USB2/Firewire case can be picked up for US$40 and any IDE drive popped into it. Again instant reasonably high-speed storage. One can even compress the files to it for more savings, use PGPdisk, encrypted NTFS, etc.

However if you're wedded to using CR/Rs or CD/RWs check out the free Burn to the Brim. While not specifically a backup application (no compression) it does pack the files best for CDs, can sort on many criteria including mp3 tags, and can generate ISO images.

Finally if you really do want a full backup strategy then I suggest Dantz's Restrospect package. Under US$100, very easy to use, cross-platform, long track record and does all that you'd want of it. Good product at a good price with good support.

Dantz Retrospect Professional is less than $90 and will do everything you're looking for. Namely, it will allow you to backup to CD-R and will span your backups across multiple media if necessary. It keeps a catalog on your local hard drive of what files it has backed-up to which media, relieving you of having to manually specify which files have changed. (You can re-create this catalog if your HD dies by just feeding Retrospect all the media from the backup set, BTW.)

Retrospect does a full backup once, and then incremental backups from then on. This means that your incrementals happen very quickly, and your backup set will only grow as quickly as you create/change files on your computer. Retrospect also will backup the registry, so you can restore the entire system if necessary.

Lastly, Retrospect has a built-in scheduler that makes it easy to schedule nightly, unattended backups. Once you're getting a snapshot of your HD every night, you can go back to any point in time and recover a file as it existed on that particular date. Truly powerful stuff, and far, far beyond what NT Backup is capable of.

Oh, and there's a free 30-day trial version you can download from Dantz' website. Its fully-functional, and when you buy a full license you can just enter the new license key into the trial install to make it permenant. That way you don't have to re-install or copy your scripts and configurations from the trial install to the full install.

My backup solution right now might be a bit involved, but it works. The public server can be restored at the drop of a hat with a kickstart CD, so that one's taken care of. The Macs are backed up via Retrospect Workgroup to one central Mac, and the contents are dumped to DDS4 tape. The internal Linux server's backed up to DDS4 tape. The Mac and Linux full backups are done twice. One copy stays here, the other goes into a safe deposit box at a bank a ways from here. Incrementals are done automatically every night and stashed in the safe -- more for fire protection than thief protection.

It's not fullproof (there are no fullproof methods with computing), but I've used the same method for about three years now, and it's gotten me through some disasters with little or no data loss. Now, if the house safe and bank's vault are both destroyed by fire, earthquake, or nuclear explosion, then I'm screwed. 'Course, I'd probably have bigger concerns on my mind at the time...

When you price a product, a rule of thumb is 10% percent of your target market should think the price is too high and will be unwilling to pay for it (that's why it's generally not a good idea to give a service away for free). But $100? For one email address? Sheesh!

I'd be willing to pay $100 and get four .mac email addresses to cover a typical US household, but the thought of paying $100 for my .Mac account and $100 for my wife's .Mac account is insane!

There are not enough Mac viruses to make bundled virus software worthwhile. And I already bought Retrospect (which sucks by the way), so I don't need backup software. So, I'm sitting here trying to justify $100/year for an email address.

Maybe Apple's losing a bundle on the free iTools, and they're hoping for one of two things:

1. Enough morons will actually pay $100 for this and Apple can make some juicy margins off of what they used to get nothing for

2. A whole lot of people will be unwilling to pay $100 for the service and will quit using it, effectively allowing Apple to kill a costly service

Apple would be more successful with item (1) with a lower entry price (say $49/year) -- and considering they already have the iTools infrastructure in place (mail servers, web servers, Web Objects applications, etc) they can only expect their service availability requirements to reduce when they charge for a service (obviously, less demand for a for-fee service than a for-free service).
Therefore, charging such a high price for the service implies that they were really trying to accomplish item (2).

So maybe they only get a 5% take on the deal. They get to get rid of 95% of the users, reducing their need to expand the infrastructure. If they eventually get rid of the service entirely, they've only angered a small fraction of users than if they had gotten rid of the for-free service.

The only solution I've seen mentioned that will work with notebook computers is Retrospect. It has a "backup server" function that will poll the clients to see if they are connected and how long it's been since their last backup. If they are connected and need a backup, then the backup automatically begins. You can backup to your server or tapes. Not a commercial for them, but it's been the best backup I've found for notebooks and lUsers out there. If they're worried about privacy, tell them anything in a folder names "personal" is not backed up, create a filter for it and tell them the leave their personal stuff in a personal folder (and if they lose personal stuff, it's their problem). Plus it runs on OSX and Windows so I can now use one tape library to back up my *nix boxes using ssh, so it's got all my platforms covered. It's made many users happy with me over the years, with little work on my part. If only the danm thing would e-mail me logs, but what do you expect from a GUI app?

Personally, we didn't even try at a number of places I've worked (years ago, before My Documents could be replicated to servers automatically and so on) - we just couldn't get everyone into the habit; since we were a Mac shop, we used Retrospect to monitor and backup everyones' workstation and make sure we hoovered out everything that couldn't be restored trivially. They do Windows now, and it's all user transparent.

1. Make sure that the new solution is in place and working. It sounds obvious, but users will pounce on any problem in the new system as an excuse to avoid changing their behavior. Debug your new backed up file server thoroughly.
2. Start with the power users. Transitioning onto a file server is an unusual problem in that it CAN actually be done one user at a time. Cultivate good habits in the people who give advice to the rest of the office.
3. Use TweakUI on the clients. The TweakUI powertoy lets you specify a disk path for the "My Documents" folder. You can remap this to the file server's drive letter, causing it to pop up as the default storage location when people hit save.
4. Carry out activities which highlight the strengths of the new system. For example, rotate people's machines out for service. When they ask what to do about their files, help them move them to the file server, and explain that that's where they should be anyway.

Christian Hicks

It does an excellent job of handling media rotation and redundant backups, and is fairly easy to use. It started on the Macintosh (and to be fair, I've only used the standalone mode on Macintosh--never the Windows version.) It'll work with tape, filesystems, removable disk, FTP servers, MO, and packet-linked CD-R[W].

I just wish they had UNIX and Linux clients....

You buy a TAPE DRIVE. Do not buy a cd-rw. Buy TAPE. Get DDS-3 dat, or VXA, or AIT, or DLT. Make your life easy, buy an autoloader. Make sure retrospect supports it (they have a list). Buy enough tape capacity to back up all the files on all the hard drives without you having to sit and change tapes for hours on end. Retrospect will automate the entire deal so you just need to be there to pick up the pay check.

Someone will give you grief about the cost of tape drive. Tell them to FUCK OFF. Tape drives are CHEAP compared to how much it'll cost your company to LOSE DATA. Buy LOTS of tapes.

With this, you back up EVERYTHING. The first part of a new backup is a pain, but from then on in Retrospect will just back up the changed files, making life very easy. Use multiple tape sets and rotate so you always keep a couple of good backups around.

I can't stress this enough, back up EVERYTHING. Do not say "I will only back up 'my documents'". People save their files all over the damned place and never know where they are. They delete stupid system files they didn't know what they were for. Once you're over the pain of the first full backup, which can take a couple of days depending on the size of your place it's easy and the incrementals are fast. And you can do DISASTER RECOVERY. As in "my hard drive crashed and I lost everything, please restore my computer to the way it was". You can point, click, blast everything onto a new drive in the machine and the machine runs exactly as it used to.

Do not wait for disaster to happen to try this, after you get a backup under your belt. Go through the restore procedure. Get another hard drive and practise doing complete system restores so that you can do it in your sleep when your CEO calls you at 2am to find his deleted girlie pictures.

If you can do this, your cow-orkers will love you. Women will love you. Men will want to BE you.

Dramatic maybe, but I'm a damned happy user of Retrospect for years and it has saved my ass more times than I can count. There are other products (Backup Exec) but I have not used them, and so I cannot vouch for them. I use Retrospect every day.

Get a tape drive and Retrospect from Dantz. If you only have one NT server, you can get Retrospect Workgroup; otherwise, you'll need Retrospect Server. You install the client software on each workstation or server you want to back up, and install the server software on the machine with the tape drive. Then you just activate all the clients, create a couple backup scripts, and change the tape every night before you leave. All this is really simple to administer because Retrospect was originally designed and written for the Macintosh. It's also fairly inexpensive, at least compared to (a) the cost of your time trying to roll your own backup solution and (b) the other backup systems on the market (which are often harder to administer and less functional).

Retrospect can easily be configured to yell at users that haven't been backed up in a certain amount of time, to either back up their entire machine or just a part of it, etc. You'll still have to get users to leave their computers on, but that'll be the extent of it.

I prefer whole-machine backups; everywhere I've used Retrospect, that's what we've done. Retrospect is smart, so it won't back up 10 copies of an identical file just because each one is on a different computer. And Retrospect also does incremental backups out of the box, so you're only backing up what changed *and* you can restore a machine to exactly the state it was at at the time of any given backup.

Sorry for the commercial, but I've been using Retrospect for my own network for 6 years now and have done work for shops that use it for 9, and I have yet to see a better backup solution.

Use Retrospect from Dantz. Cross-platform, unattended, client backup and restore, saved my ass a couple of times - your users will never notice.

While I'm in a Mac environment, I believe Retrospect is fully cross-platform.
What we did here before we went to a centralized server architecture is we ran full backups once a week (and incrementals every night) from the users' desktops to a backup server, then backed that up to DAT (this was years ago - now I'd use DLT).
With Retrospect client on every desktop machine, you can unobtrusively cause each desktop to be backed up in the middle of the night, when network traffic is light and files are not in use. If the user shuts down, Retrospect interrupts the shutdown process and waits until the backup is completed before allowing the machine to power off.
It's also real good at preserving the state of the system, making it easier to restore from bare metal.
http://www.dantz.com

Well, IMHO ArcServ blows chunks.
i've been forced to have it installed on my NT Server by the powers that be, and i don't like it one bit.
It's top heavy, installs all kind of shite on the system and, well, i just do not like it one bit.
If you are looking for good quality, ease of configuration and _most importantly_ ease of restoration, look no further than Retrospect from Dantz, they've even got a free 30 day trial version there.
I've used it in an environment where the DAT backup was long-term offline storage of high res images, and it's simply the easiest software i've used.
for hardcore users, it may not have all the features of something like ArcServ, but for day-to-day use, and sheer ease of administration, you can't beat it

-- kai

I wouldn't expect Linux versions anytime soon, but if you've got PC/Mac clients and a server that'll run the software, then go for it.