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EmailXtender - gives your users virtually unlimited storage while still keeping your exchange databases small
http://www.legato.com/products/emailxtender/emailx tender.htm

Backups run faster.
Restores run faster.
Users largely won't notice a difference - other than faster mailbox access and when archived content is accessed, it takes a few seconds to retrieve the content back into the live database.

Here are 2 archiving solutions. I work for a law firm and lawyers use Outlook for storage. We currently have a 350 MB size limit but quite a few partners exceed that and there's not a whole lot we can do to prevent that other than remind them with and email stating their mailbox is over the limit.

These 2 can move email and attachments to cheaper storage and the user doesn't know it's been moved, other than the icon next to the message. They click on the email and it opens. This eliminates .pst files. I'm sure there's other solutions out there.

Veritas' KVS

EMC's Lagato

Try:
Legato from EMC (http://www.legato.com/)
CommVault (http://www.commvault.com/)
KVS (which is now part of Veritas, http://www.veritas.com/kvs/)

We have looked at all of these for the past few months and all of these are Sarbanes-Oxley compliant.

Hopefully we'll see a 'consumer' version of Networker, which is way overpriced for at home. [I was priced almost $2k for the OS X support pak. For three machines? No thanks.]

Press release: http://www.legato.com/corporate_info/pressroom/pre ss.cfm?oid=00097363-C730-1F94-B4C880C402DA0000&lan g=en

Legato's Networker Backup is a multi platform, Enterprise level backup solution. It will back up to tape and to disk archives. We use it on all of our production level systems. You should be able to grab a copy from here.. I'm not sure if it's "free" or not since our Purchasing dept. deals with software acquisition but i've not had any problems downloading copies of it.

If you don't care about enterprise features (and if it turns out you have to purchase it and don't want to), use cygwin/rsync like everyone else says.

Legato's Networker Backup is a multi platform, Enterprise level backup solution. It will back up to tape and to disk archives. We use it on all of our production level systems. You should be able to grab a copy from here.. I'm not sure if it's "free" or not since our Purchasing dept. deals with software acquisition but i've not had any problems downloading copies of it.

If you don't care about enterprise features (and if it turns out you have to purchase it and don't want to), use cygwin/rsync like everyone else says.

Try loading up a server with 2TB of data and then do a full syncronization with a product like this. This should chew up more bandwidth than a simple file copy due to sync overhead.

Let me know how long it takes. I need numbers to justify upgrading the T1. :)

Darth McBride

NetWorker would work for you. Install the client on the user's machines and have a central backup machine. The server can be almost any current OS.

Try and get it to be company policy that backups are to be performed (ie users not shut their machines off or remove the client)

Use the monitoring features to see who's backups are not completing and go find out why. The data on the computers is property of the company, not the user...if they have a problem with that then they shouldn't have personal stuff on their work machines.

Get something like Legato Networker, or Arkeia.

No amount of coercion of users will guarantee their making backups.

Hello everyone,

In our office we use Legato Networker . When a backup kicks off it runs in a minimized window. If you want more details you can expand the window and see what the software is doing. On my system the inital backup took about an hour for 2 gigs worth of data and that was compressed to about 431 megs according to the detailed logs. Subsequent backups take about 5 min or so, but that does depend on how much has changed and when the last time I did a backup. To restore files I go to the restore pane and it shows me, in an explorer style window, my files. I find what I want to restore and then drag and drop them. The software is very simple to use for end users and backup times are configureable. Out of other backup methods I have seen this is the best.

M. Prindle
-------
Windows, Just another pane in the Glass.

(Disclaimer: I'm having my company sponsor Anton's work. ;) )

It is also commercial and expensive, but then, losing your data has a price tag too.

I find it useful (weekly backup amount some 400G).

If you are looking for software to create a cluster, there are several, depending upong what type of cluster you are trying to create. If you are creating a service-based cluster, check out TurboLinux Cluster Server, Linux Virtual Servers, PolyServe Understudy, and Legato. There are many others available, including hardware solutions from Cisco, F5, and Alteon. I'm not too familiar with Beowulf-type clusters.

If you are looking for software to manage groups of systems, that's a whole different story. You might look into Enlighten DSM, Tivoli, or OpenNMS. I'm sure there's a lot of competition in that field as well, but I don't have any experience with those products.

Freeware

http://www.amanda.org/ - Amanda

ftp://ftp.zn-gmbh.com/pub/linux/ - afbackup

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~jmelski/burt/ - Burt

http://www.estinc.com/features.html - BRU

http://www.estinc.com/qsdr.html - Quickstart

Commercial

http://www.unitrends.com/bp.html - Backup Professional

http://www.unitrends.com/ctar.html - CTAR

http://www.unitrends.com/ctarnet.html - CTAR:NET

http://www.unitrends.com/pcpara.html - PC ParaChute

http://www.arkeia.com/ - Arkeia

http://www.legato.com/Pro ducts/html/legato_networker.html - Legato Networker Linux client

http://feral.com/networker.html - Legato Networker server

ftp://ftp.legato.com/pub/Unsuppor ted/Linux_Client/ has both 4.2 and 5.1 client kits, in .gz and .rpm formats. The clients are unsupported, but they work well for us.

We use Networker to back up ~500 GB, spread across 30 clients (NT, Digital Unix/Tru64, and Linux). Backup performance is excellent (by interleaving sessions over two network cards and the local disks, it can keep two loaders running at ~5MB/sec each).

I don't know what the maximum "partition" size is, but we've backed up 150GB file domains with no problems.

Restore performance is slower, of course, but emphatically not an "all day event"; it takes a few seconds to find what you need in the database, and a couple minutes to load the tape (we're using twin 280GB DLT loaders). After that, the speed is the same as it would be for tar/dump/whatever; the tape drive must seek to your files and read, and that can take up to an hour.

If your files are spread across mutiple tapes (either because you're using incremental or differential backups, or because a single saveset spans multiple tapes), then it can be as long as two hours. If you have only a few clients, these times are reduced somewhat.

The only time I've spent an entire day doing restores is when we lost the Networker server (and its media indices), and had to use Networker's bootstrap procedure to bring back the index, followed by regular restores to bring back everything else. Because I hadn't bothered to keep hardcopies of the logs, Networker had to scan the tapes for a suitable bootstrap. The searching alone took a few hours.

A couple caveats, though: it's not cheap, and it's not easy.

Networker was designed for the kind of environment we've set up, and you may find it overkill for one or two clients. The GUI is marginal, but the command-line tools can completely eliminate it, and do more besides.

Expect to spend a couple of weeks configuring it, and a couple more getting comfortable with the (extremely powerful, IMHO) command-line tools.

You'll need a cabable server to hold the media indices -- we keep data in the index for a Quarter, and the database is over 2GB. We're using a dual-CPU Alpha 4100 @600MHz w/2GB memory, running Tru64 Unix (it's used for a number of other things, of course).

NB: starting with Networker 5, you can have the tape devices and databases on separate machines, which reduces the need for one mammoth server to do backups and media management. It's also good if you have mutiple sites separated by sub-LAN-speed links; you can put a tape device on each LAN.

cheers,
mike