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Small-Office Windows Based Backup Software?
Billhead asks: "My boss purchased a Quantum SDLT220 tape backup drive for our few computers in the office, and I have been put in charge of maintaining the backups. The only prior backup experience I have is with my home networks using Python scripts. We don't have any special needs, just encryption and scheduling. Our original backup software isn't compatible with the SDLT220, and other backup software we have tried have been horrible (unable to decrypt backups, memory leaks, unstable network backups). What does the Slashdot community use for small office backups?"
I've been using Legato (now EMC) Networker at a number of different sites for over ten years now. It's easy, reliable, and supports a wide range of hardware. It scales well, but can get quite expensive when you start adding large autoloaders into the mix.
Their site should get you started. They'll set you up with a media kit and 45 day demo licenses if you request one.
-- Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open.
I'm fond of Veritas/Symantec for windows based backups. A pain to initially configure, but the support has gotten MUCH better and it's pretty flexible about what media you can backup to and from. It's been pretty good to me for disaster recovery and it's easy to set up media rotation (which is a very important thing to a small business owner that doesn't want to go crazy creating and maintaining media libraries.
- Will you be doing backups for disaster recovery? Meaning, you won't really worry about keeping data for long periods of time as long as you have a good backup for a month or so?
- Or will you be doing backups for file restoration? Will you be needing to always recover that MS Excel document that Sally from accounting deleted 6 months ago?
Once you have that question answered, search for a backup software that fits your needs. You may look into CommVault, i'm not sure how it's priced for the regular consumer market (we're aSince big hard drives are relatively cheap, rotating external hard drives and using Acronis might do the trick.
Most of the small setups I've done have a RAID for storage and an external HDD for backup. In my experience, most tape drives are slow, cumbersome and expensive. These days, a big external HDD is cheaper and a lot easier to work with on today's OS's. Agreed, this solution may not be what works best with older OS's (we have an old IBM AIX machine here that houses our main software, ick).
:)
Windows-run servers are easy; most external HDD come with backup software. On the last one I did, the external HDD (Seagate, I think) came with the "one touch" feature. I just set the software to backup a specific shared folder (small workgroup, public storage; it's for a small newspaper), and all the lady has to do is bring the drive in, plug it in and push the button.
A *NX solution I used before was to write a simple shell script to mount an external HDD and tar.gz the appropriate directories to it for that day. The script can either be run manually or set up in cron.
But, all-in-all, research and experience is the best tool in finding what works best for your solution. I just don't like tapes.
I don't reply to Anonymous posts; if you have something to say to me, identify yourself or I won't reply.
I have a group that uses an old disk imaging software set (Ghost Corp 7) to dump client disks to a server every weekend, then they dump the files to tape. If you have access to an imaging software product like Ghost Corp 7 (the Symantec abominations suck), I'd suggest setting up an older server as the backup system (and include the tape drive), then dump the clients and your main server to the backup server. Leave the images on the backup server HDD for fast restores, and use the tapes for offsite backups. This system has worked quite well for a couple of years.
"First things first, but not necessarily in that order."
- Doctor Who
I used tar and gzip glued together with command line PHP to manage a tape library. Worked fine for years.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
This is the slickest automatic backup system you can possibly imagine for a small Windows or Linux network. Reasonably cheap, RAID 5 if you want it, and it even runs on Linux!
If you're a zombie and you know it, bite your friend!
Do you have a copy of the script? I could do with that for the server I'm building right now.
I've used BackupExec for everything at several different jobs, and it is nice, but probably overkill (and super expensive) for what you are doing.
If you don't have any real servers and you are just backing up files, you might want to check out Retrospect (now part of EMC, I think). I used this quite a bit way back when it was primarily a Mac product, but I've also used it in a Windows environment and it was far easier to use than most other backup products. From looking at EMC's site, they seem to offer quite a few different versions, but I think there is still a fairly cheap "Pro" version if you just want to backup files from a couple of desktops.
Of course, a lot of this will depend upon what OS your machines are running, and if you need to back up any specialized server apps (db, mail, etc).
here's a link to the main site
I use tape for wrapping gifts.
Out small office uses a combination of Pocketec portable USB hard drives and a simple but powerful little piece of shareware called Synchronize It! which provides us with highly customizable differential backups.The downside is that the portability of the drives hinders scheduling. However, because we can simply take the drives home with us, multiple backups of our data are available at any given time off-site. In case of theft, failure or damage to our fileserver and database, we'll be ready.
What does the Slashdot community use for small office backups?
Backups? What backups?
(That is unfortunately the most commonly used method.)
...that someone will always have it's eyes on my screen. So... no need to back, just have to ask somebody what I was writting or reading.
please excuse my apathy
Bacula
2.0.0 has just been released, with pretty much full support for Windows. It doesn't have a pretty GUI, but it should be able to do what you want. It does support VSS so it can back up Exchange and SQL for you, and i'm working on an agent to do proper backups of SQL too, and hope to add Exchange support after that.
I set up 2 Bright Sparks' product SyncBackSE for a relative, a few months ago. I needed something in a hurry, and that could be "click the button simple" for them. (It offers a lot of configuration options, but appears to have some decent defaults and allows for "profiles" (my word) that a non-expert can simply select and run.)
Simple also to the point of not hanging on open files if the user wasn't clever enough to close them, or Windoze got "stuck" holding an open file handle (can't count the number of times...). SyncBackSE supports volume shadow copy -- it can work with open files.
Note also that it supports AES encryption.
There may well be comparable and/or better alternatives. For $25 and the rush I was in, I said "good enough".
http://www.2brightsparks.com/
They even come in "Electrifying colors". http://www.superwarehouse.com/Imation_3.5_Neon_Flo ppy_for_PC_(10_pk)/11916/p/47954
I suggest Handy Backup: http://www.handybackup.com/. Simple, works well, and inexpensive.
We do small business consulting and when a client can't afford backup exec or retrospect(neither of which I like) I just make a old box a ClarkConnect Linux box and run backups via Bacula. CC has a web interface for backups, and similar functionality to backup exec, with clients for storage, and backup clients. I.e. you can run Bacula client on a windows machine and then backup that machine remotely without sharing its files, and you can run a backup file server on your windows machine without it being a smb share. I suppose you could get this functionality with any version of Linux, but I like that the end users have a web interface, should they need it. plus I'm not the worlds best Linux guy, and it is super simple to setup. oh, bacula supports most tape drives, but I've never really tried it with them, external hard drives are way cheaper, and easier to use than tape these days. if you don't have a spare machine around, setup vmware server and just run a virtual linux box. sounds a little odd, but it works great.
-and occasionaly a giant moose.
It is cheap ($147) and supports the native NTBackup format.
Use roaming profiles and map the My Documents off to a home directory on a Linux box.
Use the tapedrive to back up the linux box.
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
NovaBACKUP (PC World Best Buy; offers tape encryption)
m l?AfID=13778
http://www.novastor.com/
Cleversafe (GPL'd)
http://www.cleversafe.org/
Genie Backup Manager
http://www.genie-soft.com/products/gbm/default.ht
SyncBack (freeware)
http://www.2brightsparks.com/downloads.html
EMC Insignia Retrospect (formerly Dantz Retrospect; PC Magazine Editor's Choice)
http://www.emcinsignia.com/products/
I have set up BackupPC: http://backuppc.sourceforge.net/
For the off-site portion of things, the entire disk that backuppc runs on is periodically rsynced to an external USB drive and taken away to be exchanged with the one at the owner's house.
I ran the rsync daemon on windows as the method for BackupPC to get to the windows disks. Sharing everything via samba kept leading to stalled copies that would suddenly start up again when you started pinging the stuck machine, that sort of thing.
While tar may or may not be available (or useable) under Microsoft Windows, you might want to consider one pitfal when using tapes for backups: if the office burns down and you lose your tape drive, unless you keep a spare drive offsite you now have a box of useless tapes until you can find and purchase a new tape drive that can read them. The advantage of removeable drives in this case is you can plunk them into any PC and get at the data right away.
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
No matter what backup software you select make sure that you spend as much time evaluating restoring as you do for evaluation of backing-up. The last thing anyone needs to hear is, "Sorry, but I can't find your file. The backups are bad."
Tips based on our experience:
Symantec seems scary, due to the number of very serious failures that have been reported over the years, and due to the character of the company:
- Symantec Ghost is not the same software Ghost was previously.
Symantec bought PowerQuest's DeployCenter and relabeled it Ghost, without
making that clear in ads. That showed zero respect for their original Ghost
product; in my experience the disrespect was deserved.
- There seems to be a
social breakdown at Symantec. The company seems to have far too few people
with technical knowledge.
- My experience is that Symantec technical support is
abusive; abusiveness seems to be a major managerial method there. It is
difficult to defend against many small abuses, as both Microsoft and Karl Rove
(Bush's brain) know very well. (Abusers tend to learn by watching each other,
even though they may not know each other.)
Acronis TrueImage is generally accepted as the best backup software for small businesses now. However:- The TrueImage software is not able to make encrypted backups; it can only
password protect, a protection that is easily broken. So, don't allow anyone
to take backup media off site. Store backups in a secure vault on site.
- We have had many, many problems with unreliability of Acronis
software. A scheduled backup may not actually run, for example. Recent
versions have been more reliable.
- The command line interface of TrueImage WorkStation seemed full of bugs
when it was first released. Apparently the release was far too soon.
- Acronis technical support amazes even me. I sent a notice of a failure in
a new version. About 3 months later, I got a nonsense reply from someone who
sounded like she was about 21 years old and only working for Acronis so that
she could find a man, get pregnant, and stay home.
- Acronis sales people seem to believe that anyone with technical knowledge
is socially inferior. My experience is that they seem to think that dirtying
their little brains with technical details is beneath their exalted place in
society. When you ask for help, you may get some action that seems to be part
of internal political maneuvering.
- Acronis recently released an "update" that changed TrueImage installations
to a new product name called TrueImage Home. Apparently this is an attempt to
intimidate customers to pay for the Workstation version which is far more
expensive.
Some ugly history of backup software: Hewlett-Packard's tape backup software would, during restore, make hundreds of zero-length files in random places. The names of the files would be taken from the names of legitimate files on the tape. HP technical support thought that was not a particularly bad problem.In the DOS days, a company called Fifth Generation Systems sold a product called Fastback. The product was excellent until it was sold to a former banker who put his daughter in charge of marketing. (I talked to him for about 45 minutes on the telephone one day.) Since the banker didn't have any technical knowledge, and didn't believe that was important, and since the technical people left when the banker bought the company, the product quickly fell behind, became useless, and disappeared from the marketplace.
There are a lot of backup solutions out there. But once you move into the realm of Windows Server, they tend to jack up the prices considerably for the same product just so it'll work on Windows Server. I did a lot of researching for an incremental backup system where I work that would give me flexibility with restore, native harddrive backup, and would be ideal for a few hundred gigabytes of dynamic drive space all the employees work off from (like 15 shared folders on it). But I didn't find anything that great (NTBackup's lack of scripted restores and crappy incremental restore over a period of time got on my nerves). I ended up going with a Linux server running Backuppc.... Hated to do it (nothing else is Linux in the building), but it was either that or pay $500+ for something decent.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
I've had great success with StoreGrid.
I use the free version with a $20 plugin that allows "open file" backups.
I have it set to a continuous incremental backup of my most vital files, plus a weekly full backup, storing two whole backups at any given time, on a second drive, which in turn gets cloned to a mirror drive (yes, I've lost data before, so I'm paranoid).
-- This sig for rent.
http://www.backupexec.com/ version 11 moved totally in the right direction
Retrospect. 'nuff said.
http://www.emcinsignia.com/
I use Cobian Backup to backup some Windows data via FTP to an offsite server, but I'm not really happy with it. It was a real pain playing with the settings until the backups completed successfully. They would hang after a while and it took some trial and error to get them working, but my backup tasks are never marked as finished even though I can check the backup and see that they really are done. Cobian shows that the backup is still in progress until I reboot! The cancel button doesn't even work! I assume it works well for other people though, and setting up the tasks and their schedules is pretty easy and very flexible.
I have been using Retrospect for a couple years, and have been happy with it. Retrospect was made around 1989, was pretty much a Mac only product until around 2000 (IIRC). I like the fact that I can backup to an external hard disk, then copy the backup set to tape or a stack of DVDs. Like TSM, it offers synthetic full backups, where one doesn't have to worry about firing off a full, incremental, or differential backup -- just fire off a backup with the options you want.
Caveat: Unlike BackupMyPC or NovaStor, Retrospect uses its own packet writing format for CD and DVD backups.
As another program, Backup Exec is always good, and has been around for a decade or so. I have not tried it recently, but its always worth a look.
I'm not the biggest Symantec fan in the world, so I'm pretty unimpressed that they bought Veritas ... but BackupExec is relatively cheap (compared to anything better) and it generally works. I use it in our remote offices where we just backup 1-3 servers. It has a pretty rich featureset at this point.
I really prefer NetBackup [Enterprise or not], but it's WAY expensive compared to BackupExec. If you're only backing up a couple servers, I don't think you can justify the cost of it. I couldn't.
If you got a steal of a deal on the SDLT220 and you're backing up about 100GB of data per [however often you feel like changing tapes] and it's a new mechanism, then good for you. If not, take it back and look into an LTO-2. The media costs about the same and it holds twice as much. If a single tape is just not enough, look at the Quantum SuperLoader or SuperLoader3 (oddly, the plain SuperLoader is the older, better, & more expensive of the two)
Especially as it claims to be "The Most Popular Open Source Backup and Recovery Software"
http://amanda.zmanda.com/
I'd be interested to read what any of it's users think of it in comparison to commercial apps.
GrpA.
Enjoy science fiction? "Turing Evolved" - AI, Mecha, Androids and rail-gun battles. What more could you want?
Try these:
G4U
http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/
Cobian
http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm
Both work well.
Jeff
We use tapeware/yosemite backup. I hate it.
I wouldn't be surprised if it continues to be that way now.
The important thing that Legato provides is a reasonably well designed database / tracking system so that you can get the proper tape to the tape drive when you want to restore Karen's source code from 18 months ago.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
Why bother with a Windows solution? Is your tape drive that horrible? If it's scsi, there should be no problem mounting it up elsewhere and using all the normal tools like tar.
It would be easier still to use an external hard drive and grsync, a gui for rsync.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I am not affiliated with BackupAssist (www.backupassist.com) in any capacity other than a customer and have been thrilled with the product.
Simple and easy to use interface, multitude of options, logging, reporting. One of the features that I find most compelling is that the program is essentially a gui wrapper for the Windows Backup program and thus works perfectly with all the server and professional versions of windows seamlessly.
All too often we must make do with microsoft offerings, Backup Assist makes microsoft backup what it SHOULD have been
DSLIP Web Design and Content Management Australia.
I've had good luck with Retrospect both at home and in a small non-profit office. It's pretty simple to set up and supports encryption. Make sure that it supports your tape drive, though. www.emcinsignia.com
I'd recommend Bacula. I've installed it for several clients, all have been very happy with the results.
Disclosure: I am a Bacula developer.
Here are more notes to go with my parent comment:
Disk Image backups are required to back up the operating system drive. Disk Image backups are sector-by-sector backups. Some people call that operating system cloning or disk cloning. There is a free Linux/Unix utility called DD. DD has a Windows version, too. My understanding is that DD has no compression, so that the backups are much larger than with commercial software that compresses the images.
Microsoft has made Windows XP difficult to back up. It is necessary to have 3rd party software that can back up the operating system and also files that are in use. Windows XP will not allow copy, xcopy, or robocopy backups of the system registry for, example. For that you must have drive imaging software like Acronis TrueImage or another.
If a user forgets to close all programs, some important files may still be loaded at night and in use when backups are scheduled. That's why it is necessary to be able to back up files that are in use. Microsoft provides the API to do that, but very limited backup software called NTBackup.
Tip: Encryption is necessary. Backups that are not encrypted are somewhat useless, since it is too risky to take them off site. Remember that password protection is not encryption.
Be careful about backup software that a big company bought from some other company. When that happens, usually the technical people are fired and the company that buys the rights is not prepared technically to respect what the fired people have done. Microsoft bought rights to NTBackup from Veritas. My understanding is that Veritas bought it from Conner and Conner bought it from Arcada.
Recently Symantec bought Veritas. My experience with Symantec is that their software often has huge bugs, and their telephone support is possibly close to the worst.
I found this confused-looking but extensive list of Windows backup software: Backup Software For Windows 2000
a. have 3 different backups run once a week or need to maintain years of infomration
b. have daily incremental backups
c. provide disaster recovery for business restoration
d. preserve regulated information, either financial or healthcare
e. restore custom applications
f. reimage new systems or only preserve data
Backup exec and Acronis both provide reasonable solutions for mostly stable Windows clients. Storing active data on a SAN or file server and making that up increases the backup window for the local box. Now a days, I prefer that solutions with periodic o/s backups on a bootable DVD. Annual backups can serve if your live data isn't at risk locally.
Remember, backups are worthless. It's the restored data that has value. Test your procedures and hardware periodically, make sure you have off site hardware to restore. If your Quantum SDLT220 tape drive is out of support and the only place you get another one is from a reseller on E-Bay who's had one stored . . . . Never trust a single blob of media.
It's free, it's easy, it's reliable.
/. if no one uses the free/cheap stuff? Must be a detour into the twilight zone.
Quantum SDLT220 = $1800 for 220GB. Two 250GB drives in workstations with backup duty = $150. OK, so you don't get offsite capability unless you pop for a couple $70 NAS boxes as well.
How can this be
We provide a BackupPC based solution for our customers. It's a Mini-ITX computer that is sized and shaped somewhat like an external tape drive. It uses removable IDE drives to back up data.
Our clients love it. It's fast, powerful, easy to navigate, and proactively notifies them when there are issues. We've done everything from restore individual files to complete disaster recovery.
The "client" needed on any target you want to back up (like, say, a Windows file server) is just rsync running as a daemon. You can also add encryption with SSH, but we don't. All-in-all, it just works.
Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
A couple of windows specializing friends are using it. excellent and responsive tech support. both have used Backup exec previously.
Now supports encrypted backups.
Backup Exec does have it's problems on occasion, but it does seem to get the job done.
-ted
Here's a setup I'm using which works fairly well:
On the backup server, a removable hard disk bay in one of the 5.25" bays, SATA, connected to an eSATA adapter in a PCI-X slot. Along with this, 10 bog-standard SATA drives mounted in enclosures designed to dock in the 5.25" bay. The eSATA adapter supports hot-swap, so swapping the drives is a simple unlock, swap, lock process. For software, I'm using Backup Exec. The catch is that when formatting the drives, Windows Server reserves mount points even when the drive is removed. So I created a folder on my local disk, and mounted each drive to a separate subdirectory, e.g., C:\BACKUP VOLUMES\BACKUP A, C:\BACKUP VOLUMES\BACKUP B, etc. Then you have to go into Backup Exec and add each mount point is a separate backup-to-folder device. Group all the devices and set the backup to use that device pool. That way, it will simply use whatever disk is inserted. The one snag was that Backup Exec doesn't automatically track which disks are mounted and update the device status, so you have to run a scheduled task to restart the Backup Exec services every night before the backup begins.
This scheme is fast, relatively easy to set up, fairly inexpensive, and the process for the end user is dead simple: Remove disk, insert disk, take disk offsite.
If you don't know where you are going, you will wind up somewhere else.
works for me.
"Just Smile and Nod." --Huck
Retrospect has worked great for my 200+ computer network for ~7 years, non-stop. It just keeps going.
I looked up your tape drive & it is supported.
I think that is costs ~$500, which should last you over 5 years of service... amortize that.
We run AMANDA in our small setup. It is fantastic. The scheduler is quite sophisticated & backing up to tar makes disaster recovery easy. Not having to purchase client licenses is also a big plus
I've used Retrospect. It was "O.K.," but the above reasons make AMANDA a better fit.
We have a 5 TB RAID-5 FreeBSD server and a handfull of clients (mostly windows, but a few OS X and Linux boxes). The cygwin clients work well & there are now binaries, so you don't have to compile it yourself (as we did when we set it up a few years ago).
"Problematic" clients (such as laptops which aren't on at night) use rsync+ssh to backup to the server (which is then additionally put on tape).
Amanda provides options to encrypt the network traffic and/or the backups. It has reasonably good indexing & supports tape changers. It even supports RAIT. I have a few gripes, but relatively few of them in comparison to other backup software.
I keep is simple. A raid 5 array, rsync, tar and bzip2. Then I add periodic offsite transfers. You can build a multi TB raid array so cheap these days that you may as well build 2 and mirror them at different locations. Only a modest server is needed to control the array. HDs are cheaper that lots of the tapes out there.
$ whatis msft msft: nothing appropriate
Billhead already has a tape drive, so he might as well use it.
I personally like tapes for a number of reasons. Yes, the drives are expensive. But for small business to enterprise level hardware, the drives aren't more expensive than RAID hardware of comparable quality. Also, the cost of adding media is better with tape.
Mean-time-to-failure is better & having data segmented across several tapes is nice--if one tape fails, you should still have a backup on another tape. It is rare that that other tape would also fail. Separating the read/write mechanism from the media does improve reliability.
Also, tapes are fairly small & rugged & lend themselves to transport (to keep backups offsite, for instance).
I also disagree with your specific recommendation for hard drive backups. What you describe amounts to little more than a clunky mirroring, which is not what backups should be. Backups should be zero-touch (automated/cronned)! OP also wants network backup solution.
HDDs can be used to perform networked backups daily (and can be used to store multiple full and incremental backups, rather than a one-time mirror). They can even be put in an array to improve reliability and loaded on trays to make swapping almost as easy as tapes. But this requires the same kind of backup software that the OP is asking about. It also doesn't really solve the incremental media cost or mechanical durability issues.
I found Acronis True Image to be very helpful (and also work for Linux), in combination with a USB 2 connected hard disk. Set Acronis to have top priority and just sit back.
There are many reasons why I like Acronis:
(1) creates boot disk for "bare metal" restore (when you have to start again from the ground up)
(2) combines full system restore and file restore (so you can also restore just a file)
(3) supports rescaling of partitions
(4) supports Windows NTFS as well as Linux ext3 (I think ReiserFS as well but I don't us it)
(5) It's quite fast to backup a whole box.
(6) It's end user friendly - VERY easy to use.
I've dropped tapes because my backups are small enough, but tapes scale easier..
Insert
I don't have it anymore as I don't work there anymore. It wasn't very many lines. The heavy lifting was done by tar, gzip, and mt. The only thing the backup script did was save tgz files to a hard drive (for quick recovery purposes if something lost something within a week) and then copy those tgz files to the tapes. You can usually get away with a simple setup like that in a small company.
I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous.
We've been using an Internet based solution for a few months now, http://www.your-data.co.uk/
Only backs up our changes so it's really quick, I'm told by our IT ppl it uses blowfish(?) encryption or something like that.
While I actually use Retrospect (argh!) for the regular backup of our servers, I have a half dozen seats of SyncBack floating around on end user machines (laptops, primarily), development servers, as well as shuttling some smaller files around via FTP. With a little thought devoted to your backup schedules, it can be a really powerful tool.
We use retrospect and an 8 slot dds-4 tape library. The tape library is nice, in that we can use 3 slots for a full weekly offsite (rotated every Monday) and two slots for a Monday incrementatl set and a wednesday incremental set. We keep the incrementals forever so we could recove a 6 month (or 6 year) old file. We supplement this with a Retrospect duplicate to a hard drive (everyday) and backup duplicate to an external drive (every other day) + a three-week harddirve incremental set. The hard drive duplicates are useful if someone walks in a says that they deleted a file that they were working on today. We can get yesterday's version back instantly.
Interestingly, we run retrospect on a mac--mostly because I inherited the setup and we're backing up a SAMBA server running on a mac. This way we backup the (damn) resource forks. However, retro on the mac doesn't deal well with the registry.
Hard to use, bad, bad UI but solid. I'd vote for Retrospect for the 100 employee company.
Nice, try liar, but Fastback wasn't sold to a banker and marketed by his daughter. Fastback was sold to Symantec.
I should know, it was me that brokered the deal between Barry Bellue and Peter Norton.
", Fifth Generation Systems evolved as a major international software publisher producing thirty-four titles on a worldwide basis. The company's back-up utility, Fastback, was among the top ten best selling software packages from 1984-1992, until the company's acquisition in 1993 by Symantec Corporation, a world leader in Internet security technology."
You might want to take a look at rsnapshot - perl+rsync gives you hourly, daily, weekly, monthly snapshots - really cool, and simple to set up.
Recovery is quite simple, too.
But Herr Heisenberg, how does the electron know when I'm looking?
I've been using Bacula to backup servers at my agency (300GB+ of data) for the past year and a half. I've found it to be very reliable, flexible, and relatively easy to configure and use. I use an older version (1.36), packaged for sarge, which lacks some features I would like - migrating backups between volumes, ssl support. However, version 2.0 has just been released, and looks like it's got some sweet new features (my wishlist features included). It even runs on windows (in addition to *nix), if you swing that way. http://www.bacula.org/about/press/presskit200.html .en
OK, it's not Windows-based, but it works great and it's cheap.
I'm the IT guy for a small office (30 XP desktops, 1 W2K server, 4 linux servers). Last year I replaced my homegrown scripts with BackupPC. I have been extremely happy with the results. I took an obsolete server, loaded it with four 160 GB SATA drives and a PCI SATA adapter. Total cost was under $400. Fedora FC5 and FC6 include BackupPC in their Yum repositories, so you can easily install all necessary software at no cost. Configuration was not too complicated, although it is text-based.
BackupPC has a web-based management interface that is a snap to use. BackupPC uses some fairly advanced techniques to keep the pool of backed up data to a manageable level on disk. To get data to tape (DVD in my case), BackupPC has archive tools which by default build specific backup sets as tar archives. You can easily modify BackupPC's config file to use a custom script that also handles your encryption requirements.
We've been here before.
I'm certainly not lying! I heard that the original creators of Fastback left the company. The events, which are all that matter here in a discussion about backup software, certainly support that conclusion.
Very soon, maybe at the next version, a version was released that was so buggy Fastback lost its popularity. By the time Symantec bought it, it was unpopular junk, and Symantec killed the product. It is a fact that Fastback rapidly went from the best-selling backup product to junk.
The name Barry Bellue rings a bell. I think Bellue bought Fastback for his company, as he did with many other products. Bellue thought he knew about technology, but apparently just happened to be in the right place at the right time. His next effort seems to have ended in a lawsuit.
After Bellue fired his California marketing staff, he put his daughter in charge of writing ads. The next ad for Fastback was shockingly poor. That's what I was told; it is a fact that the ads were terrible.
The same thing happened with PC Tools. After a junk version was released by a new CEO, PC Tools was sold to Symantec, who killed it.
I never understood why Symantec would pay so much for products that were already dead when they were bought. Apparently all Symantec got was customer lists.
The underlying issue is that backup software has possibly been the category of software with the worst history.
Barry Bellue: ... nearly twelve years in financial services, banking and public accounting...
"Mr. Bellue holds a Bachelor of Science in Business and Accounting and a Master of Divinity from Southern Seminary."
"Basically, this and every other piece of Symantec software I've ever had the displeasure of dealing with is the worst piece of trash I've ever seen."
LOL. Excessive praise for Symantec, I see.
Here's a question. Why does Symantec buy software that has reached the end of its life? See my comments: Most unreliable software category: Backup software
It's fairly important to determine your exact needs before selecting a backup solution. Home users who don't care about disaster recovery have many free backup options. Technical home users can cobble together enough free stuff to make a passable backup/disaster-recovery solution. Enterprises, generally, need to be far more cautious about the software they place on their servers, and should carefully evaluate the software for stability (does it deadlock your system? do its services hang or crash? do its device drivers cause blue screens or do they have any interop issues with other drivers?), data integrity (are the back up image files good even after thousands of incrementals and splits? does it corrupt original data?) performance (does it use a lot of memory, leak memory, hog CPU or interrupt any applications?), security (does it protect your data? How are its APIs guarded?), and maintenance (is it automated, scriptable, can it be controlled remotely, can one console GUI control an entire enterprise, etc). If you are an enterprise customer, or a very discriminating customer, it would be advisable to ask the backup solution vendor these pointed questions and do your own due diligence as well.
A side note: If you are evaluating criteria like the above, in relation to memory leaking you will find that the Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Service (VSS) on Windows XP has some bugs that will cause VSS requestor processes (VSS-aware backup applications) to leak memory on each snap/unsnap cycle. Also, on XP, on each snap/unsnap cycle the vssvc.exe service as well as a dllhost.exe process will leak a little memory. This is usually only an issue if you use a VSS-compliant backup application to automatically backup your data on regular intervals over a long period of time. These same leaks used to also occur on Windows Server 2003 however they have been fixed in a recent private (you must request it, KB923628, directly from MS support) hotfix for Windows Server 2003 only.
If you are an enterprise or extremely-discriminating user, the following may prove useful.
First let me warn you that I'm a bit biased on this topic (I'm an engineer who has worked on core components for a couple of the mainstream backup/disaster-recovery products out there, from competing companies). Also, my experience on this topic is limited to the Windows platforms.
I would recommend that you consider backup solutions that enable you to quickly recovery individual files, as well as to quickly recover from a full system meltdown (ie. a hard disk crash). In my mind there are currently only three products which can do this with any degree of reliability. They are (in no particular order):
1) StorageCraft's ShadowProtect
2) Acronis' True Image
3) Symantec's Ghost (for Desktops) and LiveState Recovery (for Servers)
These three products share several similar traits. They all create backup images files which represent the entire state of a logical volume's data, rather than backing up individual files themselves. This enables you to perform full volume restoration should a disaster occur, such as a hard drive failure. They also enable you to easily restore individual files by allowing you to mount/browse into the contents of a backup image file. They allow you to backup your volumes in a hot/in-use state, so you do not need to stop any of your work or close any of your applications when the backup is performed. They allow you to set up a backup schedule so that the backups are automated and no user intervention is required to ensure that backups are occurring. They allow you to perform "incremental backups" which means that when a backup occurs, it will only backup the changes which occurred since the previous backup. They all provide a bootable "recovery environment" CD which contains a bootable OS as well as tools that can be used to restore/recovery files and/or full volumes in the event that you are restoring to a machine which doesn't contain an OS, or if you are restoring an image file over your existing OS. They a
Dude, you back up your data at home? Really???
Do you want a job at our company?
On a day when terabyte hard drives are announced, it's sad that you are saddled with tape. Your boss doesn't see the false economy of tape.
Back up to disk in the office, and for offsite storage, us an internet service. Or, put up a system in your home and back up through the network to that device. You could have your company pay your bandwidth and a portion of your electric bill.
Here's what they learned from the Northridge quake: No matter how important your data is, if your building is condemned you cannot get inside to get your tapes.
Since you mentioned that you had used Python scripts in the past arcvback (http://arcvback.com/arcvback.html) is a backup package written in Python designed to backup user data files for a small LAN. This runs as a full backup followed by a long series of incrementals so you can easily restore quite old versions of things if you need to.
I can see why you're hired full time by a FTSE 100/Fortune 500 class company to do all of their incredibly important back office IT work,
Fortune 100 company? Is that where you would like to work? I hope you get your wish.
I have worked for one of those and I did not like it. They were too busy wasting their money on stupid stuff, like expensive software that did not work, homeland security and other nonsense, to pay their people. There may be better companies out there, but big is usually dumb and abusive. I'm not going back if I can help it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I think you missed the point of my sarcastic reply; i.e. that your...solution is entirely useless.
Of course I missed that, because it's bullshit. It's stubborn fools like you that drag companies down. You cling to expensive stuff that's broken because it's all you know.
Show me Google's back up tapes. One of the big reasons they are such a big success is because they bought the cheapest junk hardware they could and made it into one of the world's largest storage networks. All it took was a little brainpower and guts.
Go ahead, sneer at me for not knowing dick about expensive tape drives and other exotic dinosaurs. I don't need it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
A belated (and biased) vote for Amanda - Open Source Backup. Amanda automatically figures out the most optimal level of backup, and stores data in a very standard format (so you can recover data even if Amanda was not running).
Amanda: Open Source Backup Software