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Remote Backup of Windows Boxes w/o Samba?
reezle asks: "I'm looking for a good (free as in beer) method to have my Debian server back up some remote Windows machines. There is no Samba in the mix; this is supposed to be a strictly secure internet thing. I've been toying with OpenSSH on the windows computers as a good tunnel, thought of simple tools like ntbackup initiated from a script on the Linux box, but not all of the pieces have come together yet. I need to have the Linux box make the connection, back up data (full and incremental backups) and have that backup data get back to the Linux machine in an encrypted format (across the wild internet). Has anyone done something like this?"
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
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
Use netcat (nc)
A version exists for Windows (it's what the kiddee's use), but it can be used for legit purposes if done properly.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
If you are copying 400 GB, you'll use 400 GB of bandwidth (less with compression, perhaps 200GB) each time you back up, whether or not anything has actually changed. That's very bad.
The advantage of stuff like rsync is that it only sends the deltas over the network. I have a daily backup of my 400 GB over the net. If nothing changes, it only uses 100k of bandwidth.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
You're taking it out of context, or maybe misunderstanding the feature. Some backup systems require OS support, so you have to install something setuid, set up a service, or hack the kernel to even get it to work. The idea is that this runs as a user (as do other programs like rsync or scp) and not as a kernel component (like a filesystem driver).
Your interpretation: This program magically allows any user to read any file on the system without admin privileges.
Correct interpretation: This program does not require admin privileges to install or run, and can run as any user. (Of course, the files that the program can access are limited by the user it runs as.)
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
Although the clients do not have built in support for encryption, according to the manual you can run the clients through stunnel to encrypt the traffic between the clients and the backup server. Future versions are supposed to support encryption built into the client.