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Remote Backup of Windows Boxes w/o Samba?

Posted by Cliff on from the data-dumps-over-a-secure-tunnel dept.

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?"

2 of 100 comments (clear)

  1. Arkeia! by GoRK · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Well since you said free as in beer not free as in libre, and since you did not say how many machines you needed to back up exactly, I might as well suggest to you that you try Arkeia. The free version, "Arkeia Light," supports a server with a single tape drive (no changer robots) and up to 2 client machines. So you can use it to back up 3 machines -- If you use more than that or if you have a tape library, you gotta cough up for a license.

    Plenty of the solutions people have posted about are fine and dandy hack jobs and while they probably will work -- they would take a lot of time and effort to implement. Arkeia is pretty easy to install on the client end - you basically just install the client and tell it the name of the server - the acutal backup is managed completely by the server. Clients are available for practically every OS under the sun.

    Arkeia has served me pretty well over the last few years, so even with the cost (not very much for a comparable solution from any other vendor) you really do get a pretty decent product.

  2. BackupPC by mrph · · Score: 3, Insightful
    I use BackupPC on a Debian box to backup some laptops and a server at work.
    It is highly configurable and easy to set up automatic backup routines and you can monitor operations
    using a webbased interface. BackupPC also supports various transfer methods such as rsync, samba, etc.
    and makes use of compression and pooling of files to save diskspace.

    Of course, getting some scripts using rsync over ssh or something like that won't be that hard,
    but anyway, I recommend you to check out BackupPC.