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Using Linux for Windows HD Snapshots?
DBordello asks: "Our company is currently backing up weekly to tape. I would like to begin taking snapshots of our NT 4.0 server. My first thought was a Linux box running an Open Source solution. My research shows that most Open Source applications to take snapshots assume that the backup target is Linux based. This presents a problem with mounting the NT 4.0 server. While I could mount the share with Samba, all of the backup applications do not provide options to backup a local mount. What do you guys use to snapshot your Windows network?"
hdup should do the job. Simple, does monthly/weekly/daily and compression + encryption if you wish.
Mount your NT filesystem via samba, specify your mounted directories to backup, put a crontab entry, that should be it.
I use it daily to store a backup file on a the same host as the filesystem backuped - then fetching it using rsync with another machine for archival purposes.
Won't keep NT permissions automatically, you should backup relevant permission files for Windows (anybody knows what they are?)
I don't know how far you have researched this, but if you are running RedHat Linux 7.x, 8.0, or 9 you already have a solution with Amanda.
Backup of Microsoft Windows machines happens via Samba shares of course, and it will run in agent or agentless mode.
Agent mode of course gives you things like bandwidth throttling and compression of the network bandwidth usage. Agentless mode and you can back up anything you can mount.
Typically you can have it use the smbtar(1) command (from Samba) to have it backup your windows machine.
The program isn't debugged until the last user is dead.