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Small-Office Windows Based Backup Software?

Posted by Cliff on from the small-scale-disaster-recovery dept.

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?"

5 of 136 comments (clear)

  1. External HDD by Daemonstar · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  2. ClarkConnect Linux and Bacula by enigmatichmachine · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  3. I'm suprised Amanda hasn't been mentioned yet. by GrpA · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?
  4. Backup Links by thisNameNotTaken · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Try these:

    G4U

    http://www.feyrer.de/g4u/

    Cobian

    http://www.educ.umu.se/~cobian/cobianbackup.htm

    Both work well.

    Jeff

  5. More notes about backup software. by Futurepower(R) · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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